How To Optimize Your BigCommerce Store To Increase Store Speed
Every business owner wants a fast and easy experience for any visitor to their website. A seamlessly designed website is one of the best ways to turn a visitor into a customer and to turn a first time customer into a loyal one. That’s because one of the biggest components of customer experience is the experience they have on the eCommerce storefront. And the speed of service is just as important when walking into a store, or opening up an online store. If your customer is experiencing delays or slow loading speeds, this will make them wait longer to get the product they want from your store. This puts you at risk for the customer to turn to your competitors. We have all experienced the annoying, lagging, web pages that we have given up on and tried something else. This is where BigCommerce optimization can help you.
BigCommerce is one of the industry leaders when it comes to eCommerce platforms, and it isn’t hard to see why. Not only is it very secure, but it’s also incredibly flexible and allows it’s users to customize it to fit their needs. It comes with more advanced SEO options and BigCommerce optimization abilities that can help with website functionality. This is one of BigCommerce’s advantages over other hosted eCommerce platforms; it allows for a greater degree of customization within your template without advanced technical or coding knowledge.
BigCommerce Optimization Tips For Better eCommerce Store Speed
After installing BigCommerce, you should make sure that your basic settings are configured properly to maximize BigCommerce optimization. One great way of ensuring this is by installing Google’s Sitemap feature and utilize their search engine tools in order to check through your pages for better individual ranking. Another tool to test your BigCommerce site speed is using Google PageSpeed Insights. This tool will run an analysis on the speed of all of your pages and point out problems that can be fixed or improved upon. Another tip to be on the lookout for is what template you are using for your BigCommerce website and how it may be affecting your speed. If you choose a cleanly and simply designed template, chances are the reduced number of features will work in your favor for website performance.
One of the biggest culprits for slowing down an eCommerce store and creating slow loading page is your images, particularly your product images. Images can be a drain on your bandwidth usage, particularly when using complex or large images. What is bandwidth? It’s the amount of data that can be transferred at one time to any server. So when a customer is viewing a product image, their browser automatically works to download the information from your image. So, the larger or more complex an image, the more bandwidth the customer’s web browser requires for it to download your image information. As your BigCommerce store grows, and the more visitors your website gets, the more bandwidth is going to be needed for your store, which can ultimately slow you down. There are ways to work around this, and your images are an easy way to do it. You can do this by compressing your image files and making them thumbnails. You can have this done automatically by installing an automatic thumbnail generator. BigCommerce recommends that you don’t have any images over 1250 pixels for the width of the image, and to use JPG files instead of PNG files.
There are a few other quick tips to ensure maximum BigCommerce optimization. First, disable or remove all default BigCommerce features that you aren’t specifically using for your site. If you aren’t using the feature, and it is just unnecessarily activated on your website, this will only serve to slow down your website performance. You should also keep in mind the number of BigCommerce apps that you are using; although BigCommerce’s advantage is that they have a lot of freedom with customization, if you do too much of it this can slow down your site. Make sure you are fixing your redirects as well. As your business grows and adapts, you may switch your products and category names which can sometimes confuse an eCommerce platform because the previous paths haven’t been forgotten. With BigCommerce, it automatically redirects every time you change something like a category name. However, this means a buildup of redirects which can slow down the site; all you need to do is go to your redirect page and clean it up.
There are other simple things you can do to stay on top of your website performance as well. First, you can reduce how many products, or the amount of information, that are shown on the main page of your website. You can also go through your website and determine how many unnecessary external links you have; keep the number of external links as low as possible will help increase your website performance.
How 1 Digital Agency Can Help With BigCommerce Optimization
Have you been frustrated with your BigCommerce site speed recently but aren’t sure how to fix it? Have you read these tips and still are unsure how to affect your BigCommerce optimization? Then choose 1 Digital Agency to help you maximize your eCommerce store’s performance to it’s fullest potential. We know our way around BigCommerce because we have been working with the platform since it’s inception, and that’s why we are certified elite experts in the eCommerce platform. This means that not only are we a highly dependable team, but we also have the experience to handle whatever problem you throw your way. And that means we can do what needs to be done in order to reach maximum BigCommerce optimization.
The services we provide don’t stop at just BigCommerce optimization. Our team specializes in designing (or redesigning) your BigCommerce store, designing templates from scratch, integrating information from other platforms, a responsive design on mobile devices, or even just fixing a small bug or problem you may have found in your system. And if you need help with BigCommerce SEO or digital marketing, we can do that too! If you have any questions about our services with BigCommerce or BigCommerce optimization, call us now at 888-982-8269 or contact us and find out more about how we can optimize your BigCommerce store!