Do you know how fast your website loads? Does it matter? More than you think.

Try to go to amazon.com – see how fast it loads. Despite having thousands and thousands (millions by now?) of products, their website loads very fast.

Does your site load as fast? It should, and it can. Especially if you run an ecommerce website.

How much does it matter. Research is showing that once you pass 2 seconds load time, people start abandoning your website. Two seconds. Count them… One… Two… And your revenue starts dropping. That is not a lot of time. Think about it – have you visited a site where the pages are slow and thought “COME ON” – we all have, and that is not good for business.

The load speed has a psychological effect, same as in a store – how quickly do you get service? Nobody likes to wait. Quicker service feels psychologically more professional.

But this is not something that happens by itself. Most ecommerce shops on WordPress runs WooCommerce. If you install this, and run a simple shop from there your load times might be as much as 4-6 seconds per page. This is too slow. It can – and should – be made faster. There are multiple techniques to reach this.

First you need a good host. Running a store in a shared environment with other shops is not recommended. You need a proper dedicated instance which only hosts your website. Preferably a scalable one, where you can scale up the power available as your business grows.

Second you need to have a cache module installed in WordPress itself. A cache modules basically combines resources on your page, and serves them as one, and creates faster, static copies of pages.

Finally you need to use a Content Delivery Network such as CloudFlare which can service your website even faster since they have a local copy of it.

Neither of these things need to be expensive, but they do need to be set up and implemented properly. The load speed also need to be monitored over time, as WordPress is a bit of a slob, and the database can slow down if not cleaned from time to time.