My store loads slowly, how to fix it
Load time or store speed is the length of time necessary for your website to fully load all the content on your page. There are factors that impact your online store speed, some of which you can adjust and some that you won’t be able to.
Self-check guide
Factors that affect site load
You should be aware of what elements can affect page load time. You can work on some of them, others are just out of our control, like your customer's device, network, or location. Your store might load faster or slower for them depending on these factors.
- Server response. This is how quickly the server relays information. We at Ecwid make sure we host online stores on fast, worldwide distributed servers with no bandwidth restrictions, and its code and infrastructure are continually being improved.
- Image size and dimension. High-resolution images generally tend to be larger files and can slow down page load speeds significantly. Ecwid automatically compresses the product images, so your store loads fast and fits well on both desktop and mobile. From your side, you have to make sure to use not-heavy pictures for your website theme.
- Customizations and apps. Live chats, pop-ups, and other customizations take some time to process depending on what information it’s calling the services which may factor into page load speed.
- Website themes. If a store’s theme uses messy or extraneous code for the page to process, it can cause slow loading times. Ecwid’s Instant site themes use a streamlined framework out of the box. If you use another platform to host your site like WordPress or Wix, make sure you use an optimized theme.
- High customer traffic. A large number of visitors on your site at one time affects the server response time.
Other ways to improve your Ecwid store speed
Your store works just fine, but you want it to load even faster. Okay, we get it. Try these tips below.
Show fewer products on the storefront
You can increase the speed by collapsing the categories and showing fewer products on the storefront page.
To collapse categories:
- From your Ecwid admin, go to the Design page.
- Scroll down to the Storefront navigation & colors section, then select Collapse categories.
Get rid of rarely used apps
Although applications from Ecwid App Market are a great way to enhance your store, sometimes the less the better. If you have too many apps installed, they can also slow the site down a little even if you are not using them.
Please, review your apps, leave only those ones that you are actively using in your store.
To uninstall apps:
- From your Ecwid admin, go to the Apps → My Apps.
- Find the app you want to uninstall, then click on it to reveal the details.
- Click Uninstall, then confirm the uninstallation.
FAQ
My store works fine, but the Google PageSpeed shows low results. Why so?
The score loading on the Google PageSpeed Insights is not the only indicator of the work of your site as PageSpeed Insights is a synthetic test. The site is loaded in an emulated environment. Because of that the results may be lower than the actual loading speed. Very often the low speed result by Google PageSpeed is shown only in this tool. Try different tools like GTmetrix or Pingdom and compare the results. In most cases you will see that actual loading speed and other tools results are different from the Google PageSpeed scores.