Shopware eCommerce is one of the top solutions for entrepreneurs or shop owners. The ultimate goals are enhancing customer experience and conversion rate. In this article, we will run through all the main ideas on why and how increasing your Shopware website performance can significantly boost your business.
Why is increasing Shopware website performance necessary?
Table of Contents
A powerful Shopware eCommerce website needs more than just an appealing design. Sluggish is one of the most frustrating issues for online shop owners. Poor website performance will cause the following problems:
- Lower your customer service, experience, and engagement
- Lower return visits
- Lost sales lead to a lower conversion rate
- Higher bounce rate
- Lower rank in organic research
Source: Smart Insights
A study by Smart Insights has shown that 57% of online customers are likely to abandon a site if it takes longer than 2 seconds to load, and 80% of them may never return.
On the other hand, a seamless and captivating website will attract more visitors and, finally, convert them into loyal customers. The better the Shopware website performance, the more customers can be served at the same time.
How to know if our Shopware eCommerce platform has problems?
Detecting problems is the first step to solving them.
Slower loading times
Does your website casually take more than 3-5 seconds to load? Especially during Hot Sales or promotion campaigns, the traffic may get so high that it exceeds your website load limits. This may either take too long to process incoming requests or time out.
Sometimes, customers will experience 503 Service Unavailable errors when queue limits are reached.
Inaccessibility
Even large companies can encounter website inaccessibility. It will consequently deny customers access to meet their services. What will happen if they can’t get access at all? Your business may lose sales to other competitors.
If your Shopware website has these 2 above symptoms, it may be the wake-up call that you need to optimize its performance.
Practical tips to increase your Shopware eCommerce website performance
The ultimate goal of a Shopware eCommerce website is to increase the conversion rate as well as the turnover of online shops. There are many factors for your shop owners to achieve their goals. However, its performance is equally important for eCommerce success.
The first 2 seconds are the key to your success and play a vital role in whether customers will stay or leave before a conversion is completed. Below are practical tips to better your Shopware website performance.
Get to know user behaviors
Remember, always strive to understand your user or target audience behaviors deeper and more intimately. This practice will assist you in optimizing your website and improving customer experience. If you are looking for any answer, start asking questions:
– Who are they? What device(s) are they using?
– What are their needs? What can I do to meet theirs?
– How can they reach my Shopware website?
– How can I persuade them to convert?
– What barriers may stop them from using/buying my product?
– Why do they leave my website?
Asking questions to have an in-depth understanding of customer behaviors
The more you understand your customers, the more appealing your website will be to them. Take a look at our recommended tools for tracking user behaviors on your Shopware eCommerce website: Google Analytics, Search Console, and Hotjar.
Optimize website appearance
The goals of optimizing your Shopware website appearance are to eliminate unnecessary or confusing calls, make it easier for customers to navigate, get information, reach your products, and finally make a purchase. A confusing and misleading organization may harm your Shopware eCommerce. Therefore, it should be user-friendly, captivating, and crystal clear to make a great first impression.
The following tips will advance your website’s appearance.
- Organizing your navigation bar (nav bar): Identify categories and subcategories for your products or services, and place them in a neat organization. The nav bar should be brief, clear, and easy for customers to understand or navigate.
- Keep it simple and accurate: Make everything as clear and short as possible. Avoid any typos, mismatched product descriptions, or photos. Keep them captivating and crystal clear. The simpler, the better!
- Pay attention to your Mega Footer: A comprehensive mega footer provides navigation links to all of your important social media platforms, pages, or necessary information. Visitors can quickly scroll down and find exactly what they are looking for.
Furthermore, customers will access your website on many kinds of devices. So it’s crucial to optimize both mobile and PC versions. If your Shopware website is clunky for mobile or PC users, it will likely increase the website’s bounce rates and, consequently, lower conversion rates.
>> Check out FREE and responsive themes for your Shopware eCommerce
Compressed images
Images play an important role in customer experience and their decision to purchase or not. With 3-10 pictures per product, that can be at least 300-1000 pictures. So if you upload these on your Shopware eCommerce randomly without compressing, it will put more weight and may considerably lower your search engine rankings.
Mind your images, and use them effectively
Images compression makes the images maintain their quality while being faster to better your Shopware website performance. However, don’t resize the images, and use an appropriate size from the start instead. Additionally, the suitable image format is WEBP. Alt text with relevant keywords should be added to every image to keep it displayed even when the image fails to load.
Some recommended tools to compress images are: JPEGmini and ImageOptim.
Cache Files
Caching files are stored in temporary storage, where they can be more easily accessed in the future. By doing this, it allows multiple website visitors to access your Shopware website seamlessly at the same time. This will significantly reduce the homepage delivery time, ensure a faster response, save bandwidth, and better your customer experience.
However, caching files doesn’t guarantee a slow website faster. It enhances the delivery time, but unless you have optimized the backend and front end, it doesn’t increase your Shopware website performance.
Update software to the latest version
Your Shopware eCommerce speed depends both on the number of installed plugins and their quality. Therefore, the simplest and most effective solution is to keep the essentials only and make sure they are updated regularly to the latest version.
Developers are striving to make their software more secure and reliable every day. The latest Shopware update may add useful features to your Shopware eCommerce and remove outdated ones. It will not only considerably boost your website performance but also secure the software.
Join a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is one of the best ways to enhance your Shopware website performance in approximately no time. It is a set of web servers geographically distributed in various locations to make it easier for customers to reach your website. It assists customers from all over the world to experience your Shopware eCommerce similarly. With distributed servers, your website can deliver media, images, and files significantly faster.
In other words, your target audience can reach or download data on your site at high speed and get access to large amounts of quality content, no matter where they are.
Constantly removing obstacles and barriers, bringing your customers closer to purchasing your products or services.
Start optimizing the Shopware website performance early
As you run your Shopware eCommerce website, you will come across tremendous issues and constantly need to optimize them. It could be confusing for any of us. However, prioritizing your Shopware website performance from scratch may put you on a better rank among competitors.
The Shopware eCommerce website can also be considered the face of your brand, business, or shop. There is no chance we can make it right from the first place, and just a few upgrades or changes may not help much. Everything should be optimized simultaneously. A powerful Shopware website could take ages to accomplish. So remember to start it as soon as possible!
Let the professionals do their work
Building an appealing and efficient Shopware eCommerce website is a heavy workload for any team, especially when you are not professional. Those above tips are just the tip of the iceberg.
Developers have the in-depth and comprehensive knowledge to make it just what you need and even BETTER! So if you are hesitating, let’s find a consultant or a professional to thrive together. Below are the reasons why BSS Commerce is the partner that you are looking for.
How our full Shopware development services will help you
BSS Commerce – Best Successful Solution Commerce started modestly in 2012.
We have more than 10 years of experience, developed 190+ extensions & apps, have had 500+ successful projects, and have 75,000+ clients worldwide.
Be partners with the experts
We can be your:
- Shopware Strategic Partner: providing strategic consulting and UX/UI design
- Shopware Developer: developing your website, mobile app, plugin, and migrating platforms
- Shopware Accelerator: increasing your website integration, speed, and enhancing features
- Shopware Support and Maintenance: long-term maintaining your Shopware eCommerce website, coding audit, and testing website on demand
>> Visit our website to learn more about our full Shopware Development Services
We also offer packaged solutions with our Shopware extensions, Magento extensions, and Shopify apps that follow up code standards for each platform.
Read more of our success stories HERE
Your success is our success. We are confident of thriving with you along the way. On top of that, under the non-disclosure agreement, your data and information are safe with us. We are open to conversation and new challenges, so don’t hesitate and give us a Hi!
FINAL THOUGHTS
Our world is constantly changing and upgrading, and new problems pop up almost every single day. The customer’s needs, demands, perspectives, and behaviors change around the clock. Therefore, keeping up with it, optimizing your Shopware eCommerce website, and building a fast, responsive, and cultivating website performance are vital.
It’s heavy work for any of us and requires in-depth knowledge. If you have tried anything in your power but are still confused, it’s time to talk to an expert. Start it early, get the best help, and grow your dominant Shopware eCommerce website with us now.
CONTACT US to share your concerns, requirements, and future goals. We are willing to support you 24/7.
