The Importance of Speed Optimization for Your Bigcommerce Store

Introduction

Bigcommerce is a growing online platform that helps your business to create, design, and manage its online presence. It provides a base for your digital store. The presence of your online store is something you can’t neglect in the technology-driven marketplace, where everything takes a new path every second.

For instance, you have established your store on Bigcommerce, and everything is placed in the right position, but still, you are not getting sufficient user retention. Why? The reason behind this is your website’s visibility; if it does not appear on search engine result pages or takes time to load, it will not get any sales, as users get frustrated with the slow-loading website.

Thus, in this comprehensive blog, we will provide you with all the ways to reduce website loading time. Additionally, we will mention the reasons that affect the website speed, how to check your website’s current performance, and critical details. Firstly, let’s start with the fundamentals of Bigcommerce.

Fundamentals of Bigcommerce

Bigcommerce is an ecommerce platform that allows brands to create and manage their online store. It provides multiple tools and features for building and running an online business. It is known for its simple and interactive UI. Now, these are the key features of Bigcommerce.

Key features and capabilities of BigCommerce include:

Online store creation: Bigcommerce provides various services to design and customize the online store; it involves appealing visual design, templates, and different themes.

Product Management: Owners can easily add and manage their products and their details, such as descriptions, images, and prices.

Payment Processing: Bigcommerce is integrated with multiple payment gateways that allow the brand to conduct secure payment transactions and increase business authenticity.

Shopping Cart: It also has a customized shopping cart where users can add, edit, and remove items.

Inventory Management: Businesses can easily manage inventory levels, receive low-stock alerts, and manage product sizes and availability.

Thus, these are the features of the Bigcommerce store that help in reducing website loading time effectively. Now, let’s delve into the ways of examining your website’s current speed.

Assessing Your Current Website Speed

To examine how fast your Bigcommerce store loads, utilize these tools and get an instant record of speed. These are a couple of options:

Google PageSpeed Insights: Google offers a tool that assesses your website’s overall speed and performance. It also provides recommendations on areas for enhancement that fast speed and user satisfaction.

GTmetrix: Another well-known website analysis tool, GTmetrix offers valuable insights into your site’s speed. It provides precise data regarding page load times and sizes and suggestions for optimizing performance.

By employing these tools to monitor your website’s speed, you can clearly understand which areas need attention. Now, move towards the importance of a fast-loading Bigcommerce website.

Negative Impacts of a Slow Loading Website

Certainly, a slow-loading website can impact negatively on your website from driving user attention to shopping behavior to conversion; if your website is not optimized it will directly impact your sales. Here, we have mentioned a few drawbacks of it in detail:

SEO & Search Engine Ranking

Websites that are not SEO-optimized always rank low on search engine results pages. This affects your sales and reduces your store’s visibility online. It’s crucial to optimize your Bigcommerce website for SEO to avoid such problems.

Unsatisfactory User Experience

When your website loads slowly, it frustrates users who have to wait just to view a product. This creates a negative impression, and visitors might perceive your store as unprofessional or unreliable.

Impact User Experience

People today have little patience for slow websites. If your Bigcommerce store takes time to load, visitors will likely leave without a second thought. This results in immediate loss and means they won’t recommend your products to others.

Reduce Conversion

If your website is not functioning properly, it will significantly impact your sales and conversion rates. To prevent this, you must prioritize speeding up your website; otherwise, you’ll suffer from a high rate of abandoned shopping carts.

Device-Friendly Issues

With most shopping done on mobile devices nowadays, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is vital. If users can’t access your site on their mobiles or it’s slow to load, they’ll opt for other mobile-optimized sites, which can harm your brand’s reputation.

So, these are the compelling reasons why optimizing the speed of your Bigcommerce store is an absolute necessity. Furthermore, we’ve outlined several strategies to help you enhance your Bigcommerce website’s loading speed.

Techniques to Boost Your Bigcommerce Store Speed

Here, we have mentioned several easy-to-implement strategies to enhance the speed of your store, resulting in improved sales and conversions.

Reduce HTTP Requests

Web browsers send HTTP requests to retrieve files like images, stylesheets, and scripts from your site. These requests can slow down your website’s loading speed. To counter this, you can compress files or consolidate multiple HTTP or JavaScript files into one. You can also use image sprites and other techniques to optimize the loading of these resources and enhance overall website performance.

Minimize App Usage

While apps can add valuable features to your Bigcommerce store, an excessive number of them can slow down your site and impact its performance. Regularly review and uninstall unnecessary apps that you don’t foresee needing in the future. Keep only those that are well-coded and essential for your store’s functionality.

Choose a Speed Optimized Theme

While Bigcommerce offers a variety of visually appealing themes, not all of them are optimized for speed. Some may look great but load slowly due to high-resolution images and feature-rich designs. When selecting a theme for your store, prioritize those that align with your design and functionality needs. This also applies to the different templates you select.

Prioritize Mobile Optimization

Ensuring your website loads quickly on mobile devices is essential for success. A mobile-friendly, fast-loading website is user-friendly and better for search engine rankings. Tools like Website Speedy can help make your site mobile-friendly in a matter of seconds, ensuring consistent visibility across all devices.

Utilize Browser Caching

Browser caching involves storing your website’s files in your visitor’s browser, reducing the need for the browser to request or download these files repeatedly.

This means that users can access previously loaded data more quickly. Configuring browser caching in your website settings can lead to noticeable improvements in load times.

Optimize Images

One of the primary culprits behind sluggish websites is large images or videos. You can reduce image size without sacrificing quality to speed up your store’s loading times. Consider enlisting the help of Bigcommerce speed optimization experts who use specialized tools and apps to trim image sizes, ensuring your website’s pictures and banners remain both high-quality and web-friendly.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network spread across the globe. Using CDN for the Bigcommerce website stores essential data such as images, stylesheets, and scripts on its servers strategically positioned around the world. When a user visits your site, the CDN serves the content from a server close to their location, reducing latency and speeding up loading times.

Reduce Redirects

Redirects are a feature that directs the browser to move from one URL to another. While they’re essential for site optimization, excessive redirects can lead to delays in page loading. Ensure you use redirects sparingly and only when necessary to maintain a smooth browsing experience.

Eliminate Render-Blocking Resources

Render-blocking occurs when a webpage waits for resources like JavaScript and CSS files to load before displaying other content. This can slow down your site. Minimize render-blocking by optimizing your code and scripts.

Keep Everything Updated

The task is not completed by fixing the issues; you need to maintain consistency in the functionality of your store. This includes updating Bigcommerce themes, apps, plugins, and more. Updates are necessary to enhance your store’s security, speed, and compatibility. This practice ensures that your store stays up to date with the enhancement and takes benefits from it.

Implementing these strategies can significantly enhance the speed of your Bigcommerce store, providing a better user experience. Thus, doing all these tasks on your own can be challenging, and you might look for the best solution; we have got you covered. Website Speedy is the best SaaS-based tool that reduces website loading time. It specializes in BigCommerce speed optimization. Additionally, it compresses the images, minimizes the HTTP request, and reduces JavaScript and CSS file size.

Optimize BigCommerce Store Speed with Website Speedy

Conclusion

In this blog, we have mentioned all the ways to boost the website’s loading speed and reduce website loading time. Moreover, our goal is to inform readers of the effective strategies they can use to emphasize the functionality of their Bigcommerce store. We have covered the fundamentals of Bigcommerce, why fast loading speed is necessary, etc.

To benefit from it, utilize the Website Speedy tool and boost the chance of your website ranking on the top of search engines. Maintain consistency in the performance of your website and take it to new heights.