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Think fast – does your website run too slow?

March 26, 2013 Written by NetSphere Category: eCommerce
Think fast – does your website run too slow?
No matter how well it worked for the tortoise, slow and steady doesn’t win the eCommerce race. In fact, if your site is running too slow, potential customers will pass you up for your faster, hare-like competitors. According to an article published on Mashable.com, for every 2 seconds of extra load time, your abandonment rate will increase by 8 percent.
 
“If you drop your load time from 8 seconds to 2 seconds, your conversion rate actually jumps up 74%,” explained the Mashable.com editors. And that really shouldn’t come as a big surprise. In a day and age where connectivity is widespread and where information can be retrieved instantaneously, patience runs thin when load times are anything but lightning speed.
 
If your load time falls in the slow to molasses category, there are a few issues that might be to blame:
  1. Your site might be bogged down with numerous third-party plug-ins, application code snippets or SaaS tags that tend to increase page load times.
  2. You could be experiencing cloud issues. The editors at Mashable.com say that “if you're using a content-delivery network (CDN), your site can slow to a crawl if your service provider is having issues.”
  3. Shared hosting plans could also be the culprit. When traffic is high and the server doesn’t have the necessary memory and CPU bandwidth to support multiple sites, load times can be slower than normal.
  4. If you use a database on your site, there could be any number of configurable parameters that could be changed to reduce resource constraints.
  5. Large images or images that haven’t been optimized for the web can also put a major drag on load times.

These are, of course, just a few reasons that a site could be running slow. Bad coding could also be part of the problem, as could the overall architecture and design. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that regardless if your load time is 8 seconds or 2 seconds, the longer the loading, the lower the conversion rate.

And because your time is just as valuable as your customers’ time, it might be worthwhile to reach out to an eCommerce provider like NetSphere Strategies to give you an assessment of your site’s functionality and speed. To learn more about the services we provide, head to our website. To get a free assessment, fill out the form on the bottom right-hand side of the landing page, and we’ll be sure to get you back to where you need to be in the online race – out in front.

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Abbe Miller is the marketing manager at NetSphere Strategies, located just outside Chicago. NetSphere Strategies is a boutique eCommerce company positioned to help businesses transform their online presence by providing a full complement of services that starts with our strategic consulting and creative design teams, then continues with building innovative solutions and providing ongoing post-project support.