4 BigCommerce Site Speed Solutions

The evolving eCommerce landscape is making it increasingly easier for merchants to accommodate to the tech-savvy consumer. With this instant gratification at our fingertips, how do you ensure the products on your BigCommerce store are seen?

The short answer: show up! You can't expect customers to purchase something that fails to load on your website. In fact, 79% of consumers who report dissatisfaction with website performance are less likely to buy from that site again.

Reduce bounce rates and improve overall product visibility by improving your BigCommerce site speed. We're sharing 4 solutions to battle a slow site speed and ensure your products are being seen.

4 BigCommerce Site Speed Solutions

BigCommerce reduced average response time on their sites to one-third of a second, so you're already ahead of the curve just by being on BigCommerce.

Tip: Run a Pingdom test on your site. Pingdom is an awesome free service that runs an analysis of your site and lists the top load speed factors.

Here are 4 solutions to solving BigCommerce Site Speed challenges:

• Use fitting image sizes
• Leverage automatic redirects
• Avoid numerous third-party apps

1. Use Fitting Image Sizes

Though we love the full-width, retina-ready photos from our professional photographer friend's latest vacation, your product photos do not need to be billboard-sized to impress customers. Keep the following guidelines in mind when sizing your images on your BigCommerce site.

72dpi

That's how many "dots per inch" your photos need to be to display properly on the web. In comparison, printed photos requires 300dpi. Limiting your photos to 72dpi increases page load speed and helps to prevent any loading errors.

1250px

This is the maximum pixel width allowed on your site. BigCommerce recommends this width (or smaller) for all of your images.

Responsiveness

Make sure you're using a BigCommerce theme or custom website build that is responsive. Having a responsive website is standard practice these days. Responsiveness helps to shrink photos as users shrink screen size and helps optimize your site for mobile.

Save Images in JPG

Though we love PNG files for saving images with transparent backgrounds, they're really big. We recommended using JPG files to keep your site clean and prevent a slow site speed.

JPG files compress PNG images to make them much smaller without sacrificing the quality. Your photos will have a white background, which makes for a pristine browsing experience.

BigCommerce Bonus!

BigCommerce automatically resizes your product images to fit in the product detail and thumbnail areas of the site, so you don't have to worry about uploading multiple versions of the same image.

2. Leverage Automatic Redirects

Maybe you've recently overhauled your site to create some slick new categories or just received a huge inventory boost. In doing so, you may have renamed some of your category pages.

Typically, this may cause problems because certain subcategories or products may be associated with a former category, and now they don't know where to go. If this happens, don't worry - BigCommerce has you covered with automatic redirects.

However, if you happened to change that category name more than once, you're now leaving a trail of redirects in your wake. A quick and easy fix requires checking out your site's redirect page and doing a bit of housekeeping.

Admin > Server Settings > 301 Redirects

Take advantage of the Dynamic Link Redirect Type. This features ties the old URL to a category (or product) within the admin regardless of where you choose to point it next.

3. Use A CDN

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to copy all of your images and other static assets from your BigCommerce store to various, global data centers. Rather than having to load these files from main data centers only, load your files from the data center that is located closest to where your shoppers are.

This helps to distribute your images and other files as quickly as possible to shoppers all over the world. If you want to customize your store's design, make use of the Bigcommerce CDN. However, if you don't feel comfortable customizing your store's design on your own, we recommend hiring a Certified BigCommerce Partner Agency, like Groove, to help.

4. Avoid Numerous Third-Party Apps

When it comes to third-party apps and integrations, try not to download too many. Although we love how BigCommerce offers a ton of applications to increase conversion, it's important to remember that the more you use, the slower your BigCommerce site speed will be. This is because more apps require more code to load each and every time your customers click around.

Pingdom may give you an idea of which apps are the biggest culprits currently on your site. Be sure to consider how "heavy" an app is before taking the plunge. Many apps have great customer support that will help answer your questions and maybe even provide a few tips of their own.

Conclusion

Improve your BigCommerce site speed (and your SEO) by implementing these 4 solutions. Our team is happy to help you leverage BigCommerce and aid in the design and development of your online store.

If you have any questions, would like to view BigCommerce sites that Groove has launched or would like to learn more about how Groove can help your mid-market business thrive on BigCommerce Enterprise, contact us through the form below. A member of our team will be in touch!