Product Sourcing News   

Optimizing Your Retail Website

Let’s Speed it Up!

By: Erik Repich & Tisha Rogers
of WorldwideBrands.com

While creating a website to sell products on it, you want shoppers to be able view your website quickly. If you’re like us, when we go to an online store and it doesn’t come up within a few seconds, we're on to the next store. Why did it take such a long time for that website to come up? What can you do about it to make sure that this doesn’t happen with your online store?

Here are several tips to speed your site up and create a more enjoyable experience for your online shoppers.

1. Optimize all of your images. When your online store takes a long time to load, one of the major factors might be that your image sizes are too large. If you don’t have the latest version of Photoshop, which does a great job in optimizing images & making them website ready, then you can go here: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/imageoptimizer/ to automatically do it for you online!

2. Check your website page weight. Page weight is a measurement of the file size of a web page that includes everything that is on that page. HTML files, images, audio or visuals and etc. Page weight is used to determine the download time for any page on your site and keep in mind, that not everyone has a really fast internet connection. So you have to keep your page weight as small as possible so they can load your site quickly as well. Here is a link to a site that you can use to check your page weight. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ If you can optimize your image in half, then it will take half as long for your webpage to load. I’ve seen it time and time again. Graphic designers love to make websites look really pretty. When they do this, they have a lot of images on the page and rarely optimize any of the images. A nice looking website does sell, but it sells a lot better when people actually stay on your website and don’t leave because your website doesn’t load fast enough.

3. Remove any elements of your web pages that are not-essential. If the image, video or sound file and/or text doesn’t contribute to your websites overall purpose, then just remove it. Unnecessary elements make the speed of your website slower and interfere with customers wanting to shop efficiently in your online store.

4. Avoid frames. Framed pages load more slowly because your internet browser has to load up multiple HTML pages. Also, some search engines don’t pick up those framed pages correctly, which results in lowering your SEO possibilities.

5. Use height & width tags in your images. After optimizing your images and you are ready to put them on your website, make sure to tag them with the height & width. This will allow the page to appear on your shoppers screen before the images are loaded, especially if your shopper is using an old browser. If you don’t tag your images with the sizes, then your page will try to resize itself as the images load which takes much longer. Or it could cause your site to “move around” when a customer is reading.

6. Remove any extra spaces in your HTML code. Every space, tab and new line character in your HTML takes up extra space which causes your page to load slowly. So remove all the extra spaces in the code that you can.

7. Break up long text. If you have a lot of text on a single page of your website, think about breaking up that text to span multiple pages and provide next or keep reading buttons for your website visitors.

All of these tips above will greatly speed up your website to make a more enjoyable experience for your customers. It will reduce frustration and allow your customers to get to do what they came to your store to do. Shop!

All of us here at WorldwideBrands.com wish you a prosperous New Year!