E-commerce - Improving load times to avoid lost purchases

The following BBC article offers the adage that nearly half of us won't wait 3 seconds for a website to load when shopping online. Almost as long as the classic 5 second food on the floor rule!

Check out the article below:

How long will you wait for a shopping website to load?

Here are the thoughts of Quban Chris Bainbridge, Platform Specialist on loading speeds:

Technically, having a great hosting infrastructure helps improve the speed of the site, an example is to have the server ‘load balanced’. Where you can have multiple servers which spin-up when demand increases and these spin down accordingly. To use an analogy, you own a bar/restaurant, when it gets really busy you can quickly increase the number of staff to serve the demand, when it gets quieter, the staff can clock off. The solution, is to create code which adheres to best practice which can execute quickly, so on the end customers machine it will load as fast as possible. An example could be when doing some interactive elements which require JavaScript. Instead of loading the whole jQuery library which takes time to load in, then to call/execute functions from this library, a quicker solution is to write some Javascript to execute the functionality as the page loads.

Even if you load balance your site, the big caveat is the 3rd party plugins. These slow the loading of the page as it will only start to render the page once it has a response. You can have the best hosting infrastructure or best website code in the land, but essentially if these plugins are slow, you are at their mercy, thus they will impact your site. A solution, is to perhaps do a A/B test of having a page with/without the plugins and see how they perform. You can do your due diligence, that yes these plugins are ‘nice’ but at the end of the day, there is one main question you can ask yourself. Does the positive effect of the all singing all dancing plugins out weigh that of lost conversion?