The“webperf” issues that many e-retailers face are recurrent. Due to a lack of knowledge of the techniques to be implemented, the web performance can however be improved relatively easily thanks to a few tricks or the help of a competent web agency.
But what are these techniques implemented by Oscaro.com, the best French e-commerce in terms of web performance?
How can you reduce the weight of your pages and achieve a loading speed worthy of Usain Bolt navigating from product page to product page?
Web performance, an asset for SEO and user experience in 2023
Don’t like waiting in line to pay for your purchases in a store?
The same is true for e-commerce: it is much more pleasant and satisfying for an Internet user to shop on a fast site. Display speed is absolutely essential to the user experience.
At Alioze, we pay particular attention to reducing the loading time of the sites we design for our clients. A visitor who waits too long is a visitor who will not hesitate to leave a site to find what he is looking for at a competitor’s better performing e-commerce.
In the same way, Internet users tend to abandon a shopping cart if the wait is too long. The link between loading speed and conversion rate is therefore easily understood.
In addition to your turnover, Google will also be grateful to you because the display speed is a very important SEO criterion. The search engine giant will prove it to you when you quickly see that optimizing your web performance will improve your indexing.
Web performance and image
Among the tips to implement for a good web performance, image files are of considerable importance. The latter are heavy, hence their tendency to slow down the loading of a web page. It is therefore necessary to measure the usefulness and interest of each visual and to avoid loading too much. On the web, the proverbial “better too much than too little” has no reason to exist.
Also, make sure that the selected images are the right size.
Beware of megabyte overflow!
Be careful not to load a large image if it is only intended to be displayed in a small space on the page. This forces the browser to resize it, which takes time. Changing the size of an image before putting it online takes only a few seconds and the optimization of your website’s performance will be significant.
Also find out how to optimize your images for SEO
HTTPS, a safe bet for security and Google
Let’s take the example of Oscaro.com. As with most major e-commerce sites, the HTTPS protocol has been implemented to improve security and data protection.
To go further, read our article on HTTPS
It’s not surprising when you consider that Google has made a promise: sites using HTTPS will be favoured in terms of referencing to encourage their migration. Eager to increase the security of its users, the search engine giant is thus seeking to transform HTTPS into a standard for browsing.
In this sense, the Mountain View firm recently published a graph on its official blog showing the constant increase in the use of the HTTPS protocol over time. More than half of the pages loaded and two-thirds of the total time spent by Chrome users on computers are via HTTPS.
Percentage of HTTPS pages loaded in Chrome
Since January 2017, the search engine giant has even been alerting Internet users browsing on Chrome, the most widely used browser in France, of the security risk incurred by visiting pages lacking the HTTPS protocol.
Additional bonus: HTTPS also has the advantage of reassuring Internet users. The padlock reassures the visitor that they can continue shopping and enter their bank details in complete security.
The importance of mobile-first for web performance
The customer of 2019 is a nomadic shopper, conducting transactions at hand or in their pocket.
Year after year, traffic from mobile devices is increasing. In fact, more than half of the queries made on Google now come from a smartphone or tablet. Responsive is therefore a priority and sites must be adapted to navigation and design on mobile screens.
Guidelines for Webperf in 2023 [EXPERT]
The excellent site Dareboost offers us a slideshow of optimization tracks:
