E-commerce Insights: Speed Up Your Site to Sell More

Speed is an often-overlooked component of Web site usability. Users perceive faster sites as more functional. Usable Web sites sell more. If a site responds quickly, users are less likely to abandon ship if they get confused. Case closed. Read on!

Best-of-class organizations, such as Google, Craigslist and Amazon.com, deliberately strive for site speed. Regardless of your size, your Web team can and should do the same.

There’s no “magic bullet” to speed up your site, however. Speed comes from implementing many simple changes. Here are four broad strategies and 24 tactics to speed up your site.

Strategy 1: Manage for Speed

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. So, benchmark your site against your competitors’ sites. Set a goal of being the fastest site among your competitive group within six months. Establish a site speed composite metric, such as average load times of your homepage, typical category page, typical product page and typical site search.

→ Measure the speed of a page by signing up for a Web monitoring service such as AlertSite, Webmetrics or Keynote Systems. Then, average the times from their various monitoring locations across the country.

→ Establish a site speed composite metric. Hit an average load time of up to 1.5 seconds over broadband.

→ Quarterly, shop your site using AOL or another dial-up service. Go all the way through to completed checkout, because about 30 percent of U.S. households still are using it. Fix painfully slow pages.

Strategy 2: Remove Needless Inefficiencies

What’s the greatest speed improvement you can make? Remove the need to serve it. Trim needless steps from your shopping path, and get visitors quickly to what they’re seeking.

Site search is the most frequently used navigation tool on Web sites. Save users time by getting them the right results on their first search attempt. Google significantly has raised the bar for search. So, users will expect your site search to be fast, relevant and robust. Your site search should handle typos gracefully. (Incredibly, as of April 2007, Amazon.com’s search still fails on simple typos.) Your site search should present in-stock merchandise first.

→ Improve the speed and quality of your site search. Evaluate hardware solutions like Google’s Search Appliance, and software solutions, such as Endeca or Celebros.

→ Shorten your shopping cart checkout path, if possible. Optimize checkout for the most common case. Offer special navigation paths for users with less common needs — such as gift wrap, multiple payment types on a single order and shipping to multiple addresses — to keep the main checkout path short.

→ Separate broadband and regular content. If it makes marketing sense, offer larger images, Flash, sound clips and video. Make them optional. Denote slow links. Let users decide if they want to use them.

→ Alert customers to possible delays. If an operation will take some time — e.g., checking product availability, generating a custom quote, rendering an image — let users know they’ll experience some wait, and provide a dynamic progress bar.

→ Always use height and width tags on images so browsers can size the page immediately.

Strategy 3: Send Less Data (Fewer Bytes)

By taking video and sound off of your central navigational path, your images will be the largest files sent. Use smaller images optimized for Web resolution. Pull extra bytes from your HTML source by deleting white space and comments. Minimize the number of files included to reduce the overhead of each HTTP request.

→ Let users decide whether to click on additional image views, e.g., enlargements or close-ups. Use the smallest images you can without sacrificing merchandising considerations.

→ Shrink image files to their display size. Never resize large images on the client via height and width tags.

→ Use smart cascading style sheets (CSS) to reduce markup. Use the cascading property of CSS to style your whole page in one place, overriding where needed. You shouldn’t have to repeat font information for each row in a table, for example. Apply the style to the entire table. (Better yet, apply a default style to every table on the site and override as needed.)

→ Only use HTML tables for tabular data. Use CSS to lay out pages. Table-free layouts require less markup, are easier to maintain and render more quickly.

→ Where possible, move CSS and JavaScript off the page into external files. This allows the browser to cache them across the page loads.

→ Combine multiple-site style sheets and multiple-site script files into single files, when possible. It reduces the number of requests for each page.

→ Keep cookies small in size and few in number. The browser sends and receives cookies on each request.

→ Use a filter to strip superfluous white space characters and comments from your HTML.

→ Use CSS and colored DIVs (divisions or sections in HTML documents) for text banners and rectangular callouts. Avoid using images.

Strategy 4: Build Pages Faster

After minimizing the amount of data you’re sending, generate that data as quickly as possible. Typically, database operations are your speed bottleneck. Optimize your Web databases for speed. Keep requests for static content from slowing down requests for dynamic pages.

→ Install more memory on your Web and database servers.

→ Invest in faster disks for your database servers.

→ Keep analysis queries off your transactional Web database server.

→ Serve static content from a dedicated static-serving Web server.

→ Try Akamai to cache images closer to end users.

→ Tune your Web server software. Enable code persistence (mod_perl, mod_php, shared database handles, etc.).

→ Study slow database query logs. Put better indices on key tables. Rewrite slow queries.«

* * * For another important way to speed up your site, click on “Generate More Speed: Minimize Dynamic Content” under Related Content.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman, Ph.D., heads the Rimm-Kaufman Group, an online marketing agency offering paid search services and Web-effectiveness consulting. You can reach him online at www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog.