3 Most Important Factors That Make a Successful E-Commerce Site

If you sell products E-Commerce success is crucial to the success of your business. Considering the competition, making your customers happy is harder than ever. As customer patience diminishes, the speed and overall performance of E-commerce websites have become a priority for all businesses.

Shopping cart desertion is a real disease for E-commerce, and retailers are trying to discover a remedy for it. They are making great strides in facilitating signup and checkout processes, improving shipping rates and policies, cutting extra costs, strengthening online store security, and more. 

However, such an aspect as a website’s low speed is often neglected. This can be very harmful to your business. Every user in the world expects a webpage to load in two seconds or less. 

Consequently, a slow website may lead to crazy abandonment rates while decreasing customer loyalty. Data suggests that 64% of your shoppers won’t come back if your website takes too long to load. It is crucial that an E-commerce website offers quick response. Your conversions (users buying on your website) will suffer if you don’t get a handle on this. 

One could write a book on all the factors that can help improve your E-commerce website’s chance to sell, but below we have three quick steps you can take right now to improve your speed, and consequently your chances to sell.

1. Confirm that Content Delivery Network (CDN) is not Disabled

Do you know what makes your E-commerce site successful? CDN! It is a non-negotiable factor for platform performance.

A Content Distribution Network or Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a group of servers dispersed all around the world. It delivers the content to the closest server to your visitor’s location, making local user experiences faster. 

Whether we know it or not, every one of us is associated with CDNs on a daily basis; when watching Facebook videos or scrolling social media feeds, reading blogs on news sites, shopping online. 

Let’s see what happens under the hood. The content delivery network (CDN) stores a cached version of your website content on servers around the globe. This process can reduce load time because it improves latency, which is the time it takes for a page asset (example given, an image) to load after being requested. That is because these CDNs are much closer to most consumers than the origin server, so the bytes don’t have to travel long.

Many people already know the importance of CDN. However, it is common that when someone is making changes to a site, they turn off CDN so the site-in-progress version is not cached. Many times that CDN is not turned back on after the changes have been made. That slows down the website. Always confirm that your CDN is working properly. There are many online tools that can help you check this. Just look for any “CDN Checker” online and you’ll see many that will provide detailed information on your site’s load times from multiple locations.

2.  Use a Fast and Reliable Hosting

You know your website is slow, but what exactly is making it sluggish? The speed of a page can vary depending on a user’s device or network but still, your infrastructure and hosting service can influence your E-commerce website performance. 

Many E-commerce sites crash during black Friday or Christmas sale experienced by name-brand retailers. According to ITIC’s survey, “81% of respondents said 60 minutes of downtime costs their business over $300,000.” That’s a humungous amount, isn’t that?

The hosting platform plays an important role and choosing the right hosting platform is what makes your E-commerce site successful. Make sure you look at when researching hosting platform requirements: 

  • Memory or bandwidth limits for scaling during flash sales and seasonal promotions.
  • Projected traffic and peak user load to avoid crashes from a sudden spike in visitors.

 3. Organize your Tracking with Google Tag Manager

Just as important as speed, data collection is an important component of your E-Commerce website’s success as well. Customer data feed your digital marketing strategies, but collecting that data can also make your website sluggish and end up slowing down your site performance. All those JavaScript tracking tags can load up a page and make loading slow. 

Collection of customer data can be a big resource and time burden on you or whoever is responsible for your marketing. To resolve this problem you can use a Tag Management System like Google Tag Manager. It condenses all your tags into one JavaScript request. If your website goes down because of a tag failure, Tag Management System removes that tag immediately.

According to the Tag Inspector, “Reduce the number of required outside calls. It also makes this request asynchronously (in the background, letting the rest of your website load independently of the response outcome).” 

Conclusion

E-commerce websites seem to be eating up the retail world right now. Online sales are changing the landscape in ways we never thought possible just  a few years ago. So an E-commerce website is a necessity for any business selling products. In the same vein, it is crucial to know what makes your E-commerce website successful as your business’ success depends on it. 

To be successful you have to stay on top of all the new technologies available so you can maximize the effectiveness of your E-commerce site, and by extension your business. Many business owners don’t have the time or expertise to do that. That’s why services like ours can be very helpful as they do the optimization work for you, and you only have to make sure you provide the best product and service for your business’ success.