Has your online medical store slowed to a crawl? Bad news: This is losing you customers and costing you money.
Google has announced that page speed is a ranking factor for its Mobile First Index. And considering that mobile browsing has overtaken desktop browsing, this is something you need to think about.
Read on, to learn how you can speed up your online medical store.
Speeding Up Your Online Medical Store
Whether your website’s focus is on mesothelioma or arthritis, melanoma or supplements, it needs to load quickly if you want customers to buy your products.
Amazon found that slowing page speed by 1% could cost the company up to $1.6 billion annually. And Google found that an extra four tenths of a second can be the difference between 8 million searches- and millions of fewer adverts.
Luckily, there are a few things you can do to make a massive difference to your page speed:
Check Your Web Host
So you’re getting lots of traffic to your store.
Awesome!
But that traffic is causing your website to slow down.
Not so awesome.
Poor server performance is usually due to your web host. Cheap web hosts will host your website on a shared server, meaning you’re sharing resources and space with lots of other websites.
Your server can only serve a limited number of people at one time. You can speed this up by shopping around for a trustworthy web host and upgrading to a package that allows you to have more traffic.
Use Browser Caching
When you set expires headers for resources like images, your customer’s browsers will store them in their cache. That means that the page will load faster the next time that visitor returns since those images are already available and ready to go in the browser.
Remove Unnecessary Add-ons and Plugins
These can greatly reduce your website speed, particularly if you’re using WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla.
It’s also important to remember that it’s not just about the total number of plugins you have on your website, but also about their quality. If you’ve chosen well, you could have a much faster online medical store with 50 plugins, compared to a competitor who has 10.
Avoid those that perform a lot of remote requests, load lots of styles and scripts, and add too many extra database queries.
Check Your Images
Any good medical store will have attractive images. But if they’re not optimized, your website may take far too long to load.
The higher the size and quality of your images, the longer they’ll take to load. That’s why you should reduce your image size whenever possible. Check out the Smush Image Compressor to make it easy.
Reduce HTTP Requests
80% of your medical store’s load time is spent downloading various pieces of each page. This includes Flash, scripts, stylesheets, images etc.
Each one of these elements has an HTTP request, which means the more components you have on each page, the longer it takes to load.
For this reason, remember these things:
- Streamline how many elements you have on each page
- Swap out images for CSS whenever you can
- Try to combine your style sheets
- Aim to reduce your scripts and keep them at the bottom of each page
Wrapping Up
As you can see, there are many different things you can do to speed up your site.
But one of the most important things you can do is monitor your site so you know when you’re having problems. Get in touch to find out how we can help.
