How to Maintain a Fast eCommerce Website
Whether you’re adding functionality to your website through a plugin, a theme, or carrying out bespoke development, it’s important to review any changes you make and the impact they have on your site performance.
For any website, but especially for ecommerce, performance is extremely important. Your website speed has an impact on how you rank on search engines and on your customers’ experience when shopping with you. Slow websites result in fewer page views, a reduction in customer satisfaction, and fewer conversions.
Setting up a website that’s optimized for speed is not a one-time deal. As your site grows, any changes you make can impact the work you’ve already done. If you’ve made a change that seems to be affecting your performance, you should immediately address it to get your site back on track.
Creating the foundation
Before getting into all the considerations when making adjustments to your existing website, it’s very important to start with a solid foundation. For the purposes of this article, we’ll assume you are using WordPress, but much of the process still applies when working with other platforms.
From the outset, ensure you are hosting your website on a high-performance provider such as SiteGround. You should enable some form of caching (with SiteGround you can enable SuperCacher) which will keep things fast. For caching, although there are some amazing techniques that will make everything faster for the vast majority of people landing on your website, you still have to keep in mind visitors receiving an uncached piece of content. Caching is not a solution to all performance issues, especially since not all content can be cached.
It’s important to start with an optimized foundation for key areas of your website such as the home, product, cart and checkout pages. Ideally, you should also have a staging environment in order to carry out future tests in a safe way.
Setting a baseline
First of all, you’ll want to get a baseline of your current performance to know what you are working with.
To do this, I recommend using a selection of different tools, some of which serve the same function but ensure your results are more representative of your visitors. These tools are all free.
- GTMetrix, provides an in-depth analysis of your page speed scores, fully-loaded times, page size and even total request generated on the page along with resolutions.
- Pingdom, this serves the same purpose as GTMetrix but using multiple versions of a similar tool increases the accuracy of your results.
- Google PageSpeed Insights, provides information on how your page loads along with additional audits and how to resolve issues if they are present.
- Query Monitor, a WordPress plugin that gives insights into what your website is doing behind the scenes, how much memory it’s using, how many database queries it’s making, how many outside requests it makes and much more.
- Chrome Developer tools, these are tools built into the Chrome browser that allow you to review, monitor and debug certain performance-heavy areas and even test things such as page speed yourself. If you’ve never used these tools, right-click on a website in Chrome and select inspect.
Start by using the first three tools above to run through your homepage and a product page. These first steps are easier to work with right in the browser without technical knowledge.
Once you’ve gone through these and made a note of the applicable load time, page size, etc., it’s time to move on to testing the cart, checkout and add to cart in your browser. To do so, head over to one of your product pages and open the developer tools (you can do so as above, use F12 or option + command + I)
Clear the log of any entries using the stop icon on the left-hand side, enable preserve log and disable cache. Once you’ve done so, add an item to your cart and make a note of the information along the bottom bar, repeat the same steps for the cart and checkout ensuring you have at least one item in your cart when you do so.
You can even use the menu highlighted in the image above to limit the speed of your tests. This is helpful when it comes to mobile users who are likely to be on slower connections such as 3G (always remember to switch this back to online if you change it though).
Building for the future
Now that you have a baseline to work with you can use this in the future whenever you make significant changes to your website. You can also use this to create certain targets for how fast the website should be.
If your baseline numbers seem slow, I would highly recommend going through Andrea Zoellner’s article which provides a brilliant starting point to boost performance all round.
Moving forward, you can use your staging website to test out new plugins, themes, or custom code, ensuring they provide what you are looking for. Make sure they aren’t causing any performance regressions by running through the tests again. You might be surprised at what can have an impact on your website speed. When companies like Amazon note that for every added 100ms in loading time, it cost them 1% in sales, it’s important to keep on top of these things.
A real world example of naive bespoke development
Now that we’ve gone through some of the basics, I’ll provide a real world example of a very small piece of code that had a significant impact on the speed of adding to cart, viewing the cart and using the checkout. This is a little more technical but provides a good insight into how a seemingly minor piece of code can have a big impact.
In this example, I addressed the general performance of the site but quickly noticed that there was still a major issue with the cart and checkout. It was taking anywhere between 5 and 20 seconds to load these two pages, which is way beyond an acceptable level (you want to aim for 1 to 3 seconds at most if you can). In return, this was causing a major decline in purchases. If a customer can browse your site, add items to the cart but then they get to the cart or checkout and it takes a long time to load, they are likely to give up after 5 seconds and your conversion rates drop significantly.
At this point, I decided to install the Query Monitor plugin on the site to see if anything obvious would jump out. After installing the plugin and activating it, I then went to the cart to see what diagnostic information it would give me. The first thing that jumped out was that the page was using a large amount of memory —60mb in fact! This may not sound like much, but it adds up quickly when you have a large amount of visitors on your site. This high memory usage lead me to believe that perhaps the page was loading a large amount of data from the database. I switched the query monitor tab to queries and scrolled through the list to eventually come across a particular query that had a very high row count and was taking a long time to process. This confirmed my initial suspicions for the reason of the high memory usage.
Then, we disabled every plugin except WooCommerce, repeated our test and still had an issue. We changed the theme, repeated our test and the issue was gone. Now we knew it was theme-related.
Knowing this, we re-enabled the plugins, carried out a further test and found that everything was running smoothly and at a much more acceptable: 2 second load time on the cart. We then re-enabled the bespoke theme and started digging into it, beginning with the functions.php file.
During this time, I also had a discussion with the client to establish if they’d had anything in particular added recently because this issue was relatively new. They noted some functionality was developed for them. The new functionality was that a particular coupon would be automatically added to the cart if a customer was logged in and they had not made a previous purchase.
As you can imagine, there was a little back and forth here but it wasn’t long before I found what seemed to be the offending code. I commented it out and ran another test: 2 seconds load time again. Bingo! We found the issue. But now, how do we solve it?
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