How To Improve Website Speed (for Better User Experience & Google Rankings)

Key takeaways 

• Even a one-second delay can significantly reduce conversions, leading to lost sales and frustrated customers who will abandon their carts or go to competitors.
• Large, unoptimized product photos are often the biggest culprit for slow websites. 
• Your web hosting plays a critical role in your site’s overall speed and responsiveness. 

In online retail, website speed is your competitive edge. It’s how fast product pages, listings, and checkout appear. Because slow loading web pages cost you money and customers.  

A one-second delay in page load time can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions. That’s lost sales. Slow loading websites also frustrate customers, leading to abandoned carts and bounce faster competitors. Plus, search engines like Google penalize slow websites in rankings, making you harder to find.  

If you’re asking how to improve website speed or what causes slow websites, you’re in the right place. This guide offers actionable tips to boost your eCommerce store’s performance, enhance customer experience, and improve your online visibility.  

Understanding website speed: fundamentals and key metrics  

Before you make your eCommerce store lightning-fast, you need to understand what “fast” actually means and how to measure it.   

For this section, let’s find out the following:  

• What makes an eCommerce website slow  
• How to measure your eCommerce website speed  
• What are the key metrics  

What makes an eCommerce website slow?  

Many factors drag down your online store’s speed. For eCommerce, the most common culprits are:  

• Large, unoptimized images. High-resolution product photos are fantastic for showing off your inventory.  However, if they’re not compressed and sized correctly, they can be huge files that take ages to download.  
• Too many product images. Lots of images on a product page or category listing can accumulate into a heavy load, affecting page speed.  
• Inefficient themes and plugins/apps. Many eCommerce platforms rely on themes and apps. If these are poorly coded or you have too many, they can add significant bloat that slows down your site.  
• Excessive JavaScript. Interactive elements, third-party analytics, review widgets, and pop-ups on your product pages or checkout can all use JavaScript. This can prevent your page from loading quickly.  
• Slow hosting server. Your website needs a place to live online, and if your web hosting provider isn’t up to par, or your plan is too basic for your traffic, your entire site will suffer slow response times.  
• Unoptimized databases. For stores with many products, customers, and orders, a messy or inefficient database can slow down how quickly product information is retrieved.  

How to measure your eCommerce website speed?  

Knowing what is slowing you down starts with knowing how to measure it. Fortunately, there are free, user-friendly tools that give you valuable insights:  

• Google PageSpeed Insights. A Google tool that analyzes webpage performance on mobile and desktop. You can simply plug in in your eCommerce URL and it analyzes both mobile and desktop performance. This tool will give you a score from 0-100, along with actionable recommendations.  
• Google Search Console (Core Web Vitals Report). Google Search Console (GSC) provides a real-world view of how actual users experience your site’s speed. It focuses on the “Core Web Vitals” which are critical metrics Google uses to assess user experience and, increasingly, search engine optimization (SEO) ranking.  
• GTmetrix and Pingdom. These tools offer a deeper dive into waterfall charts, showing you exactly which elements—like images and scripts—are taking the longest to load on your product pages and site.  

What are the key metrics to measure website speed?  

Google has identified three primary metrics that are important for a good user experience, and they’re significant for your eCommerce site’s SEO. These are called Core Web Vitals:  

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)  
  • What it is: This measures how long it takes for the largest piece of content on your page ( hero image, product photo, or main product description) to become visible. For eCommerce, this often means your main product image or banner 
  • Why it matters: It tells you when your customers see the most important part of your product page. A slow LCP means customers are waiting a long time to see what you’re selling.  
  • Ideal score: Aim for an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less.  

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) 
  • What it is: This measures how much unexpected layout shift occurs on your page. Ever clicked a button, and suddenly something else shifted on the screen, making you click the wrong thing? That’s CLS. On eCommerce sites, this often happens with images loads later than expected, ads popping in, or dynamic content shifting texts around.  
  • Why it matters: It’s incredibly frustrating for users, especially on product pages where precise clicks, like “Add to Cart” or “Select Size,” are pivotal in the customer’s shopping experience.  
  • Ideal score: Aim for a CLS of 0.1 or less.  

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP)  
  • What it is: This measures how quickly your page responds to a user’s interaction—like clicking “Add to Cart” button, selecting a size option, or typing into a search bar. It’s about responsiveness.  
  • Why it matters: In eCommerce, responsiveness is everything, as 76% of US online shoppers buy from their smartphone. If your product filters lag, or the “Add to Cart” button doesn’t respond instantly, customers get impatient.  
  • Ideal score: Aim for an INP of 200 milliseconds or less.  

Core strategies to improve website speed  

Now that you know what makes a site slow and how to measure it, let’s get into the practical steps. These are the most impactful changes you can make to speed up your eCommerce store:  

• Optimize images  
• Leverage caching effectively  
• Minimize & optimize code  
• Optimize server and hosting  

Optimize your image files 

For an eCommerce site, high-quality product images are a must. However, they’re also the most common reason why your website is slow.   

Here’s how to get stunning visuals without sacrificing speed:  

1. Compress your images smartly  

Before uploading, compress all product photos. Use online tools like TinyPNG or check if your eCommerce platform has a built-in image optimizer. Smaller files load faster. Aim for images that are typically hundreds of kilobytes (KB). Aim for images that are typically under 200KB per image and 100KB for blog images.   

2. Choose the right image format  

• JPEG. Ideal for photographs and complex images. Offers good quality at  small file sizes. 
• PNG. Best for images with transparent backgrounds, like your logo or product overlays, or graphics with sharp edges. Files tend to be larger than JPEGs.  
• WebP & AVIF. These are “next-gen” formats that offer superior compression and quality compared to JPEG and PNG. Browsers are increasingly supporting them. If your platform or a tool offers conversion to WebP or AVIF, then you better use it.   

3. Implement lazy loading for images  

Enable “lazy loading” (deferring non-critical resources until necessary) for images. Most modern themes or platforms offer this. Images only load as customers scroll down the page, making the initial page view much faster.  

Leverage caching effectively  

Caching is like giving your website visitors a head start. When someone visits a product page, the page “remembers” parts of the visit, so it loads faster next time.  

1. Browser caching  

When a customer visits your eCommerce site, their web browser saves copies of static files on their device. These files can be your logo, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) stylesheets, and JavaScript. The next time they visit any page on your site, their browser doesn’t have to download those files again. This makes repeat visits incredibly fast and smooth, which is great for customer retention and encouraging multiple purchases.  

2. Server-side caching  

Instead of rebuilding each product page from scratch, the server just serves the pre-built, cached memory every time someone visits. For eCommerce sites with many products and dynamic content, server-side caching dramatically reduces the workload on your server.  

3. Content delivery networks (CDNs)  

Imagine your eCommerce store is hosted in New York. If a customer in London visits your site, their request has to travel across the Atlantic, which adds delay or latency. A CDN solves this by having copies of your website’s static files stored on servers located all over the world. When a customer visits, the CDN delivers the content from the server closest to them.  

CDNs make your website load much faster by storing copies of your site’s content closer to your users. So, no matter where your customers are in the world, images and other files appear almost instantly.  

Minimize and optimize code  

Your website’s code — the underlying instructions for how everything looks and behaves — can be a source of sluggishness if it’s overloaded or inefficient. Here’s how you can minimize and optimize your website code.  

1. Minification  

“Minify” your CSS, JavaScript, and HyperText Markup Language (HTML) files. This removes unnecessary spaces and characters. Smaller code files download faster, making your product pages appear quicker. 

2. Compression   

Ensure your server uses compression for your code files. Gzip and Brotli are two common compression methods. To make your website load much quicker, this process shrinks your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, sometimes by as much as 70-90%. This smaller size allows browsers to download your site’s content much faster. 

3. Prioritize what loads first 

Configure your site to load important visual elements before less critical features like rich media ads or chat widgets. This helps your customers see your key products and content quickly, improving the LCP metric. 

Choose the server and hosting  

The foundation of your eCommerce site’s speed lies in its hosting. A strong foundation ensures consistent speed. Network Solutions, with its long history in web presence, understands this best. 

1. Right hosting plan  

• Shared hosting. Often the cheapest option, where your site shares server resources with many others. Fine for very small new stores, but quickly becomes a bottleneck as your traffic grows. If your product pages are slow, this is often the first place to look.  
• Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting. A step up, offering dedicated resources within a shared physical server. Better performance and more control than shared hosting.  
• Dedicated hosting. You get an entire physical server just for your eCommerce site. Maximum performance and control—ideal for large, high-traffic stores.  
• Cloud hosting. Highly scalable and flexible, drawing resources from a network of servers. Excellent for handling traffic spikes, especially during holiday sales, because resources can be easily adjusted.  
• Managed eCommerce hosting. Some providers offer hosting specifically optimized for eCommerce platforms. These often come with pre-configured caching, CDNs, and security features.  

2. Server response time   

This is the time it takes from when a user clicks on a link until your server sends back the very first byte of data. A high Time to First Byte (TTFB) means your server is sluggish.  

Your hosting quality, server configuration, database performance, and inefficient server-side code can all contribute to your page load speed. Regularly review your hosting plan and consider if it aligns with your store’s traffic and complexity.  

3. Database optimization  

Your database stores all your product information, customer accounts, orders, and more. A cluttered or unoptimized database queries can slow down how quickly your server retrieves and displays product data.  

Tip: Regularly clean up old data, optimize database tables, and ensure proper indexing for faster queries. Your hosting provider might offer tools for this, or you can use plugins for CMS platforms.  

4. Modern protocols (HTTP/2 and HTTP/3)  

Ensure your hosting supports Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP/2 and, ideally, HTTP/3. These newer web technologies allow browsers to download multiple parts of your page at once, speeding up complex product pages with many images and elements. 

Your speedy eCommerce advantage! 

Making your eCommerce website faster isn’t just about technical tweaks; it’s about boosting your business. A quick-loading store means happier customers, more completed sales, and better visibility in search results. 

You’ve learned what causes slow websites and gained actionable tips on how to fix slow website issues, from optimizing product images and leveraging caching to choosing the right hosting partner like Network Solutions. By prioritizing speed, you’re building a reliable, user-friendly shopping experience that keeps customers coming back.  building a reliable, user-friendly shopping experience that keeps customers coming back.  

Start today! Your customers (and search engines) will thank you! 

Frequently asked questions