3 minuti
Marco
The result? A leakage of sensitive data of several site subscribers and a disastrous moment for technicians and users.
If you are wondering whether it could happen to you too, the answer is: yes.
Your site may not receive as many simultaneous requests as the INPS site, but it is also true that it probably does not have the resources to process even one thousandth of those hypothetical requests.
With this article, we would like to outline the most common reasons why your e-commerce or the one you are building might not be technically suitable for its online function.
In particular, we are addressing all those businesses that have recently experienced a strong surge in sales but also several technical problems and slowdowns, as well as those businesses that previously considered e-commerce a secondary business but have now discovered the full potential of this channel.
What e-commerce do I have or am I building?
If there are many users visiting your site at the same time and, during numerous meetings with your IT department or trusted web agency to build or maintain your e-commerce, keywords such as scalability, cdn, peak users or distributed systems have never been mentioned, we have bad news for you: you may have, or soon will have, an e-commerce ready to leave you stranded.
If for Black Friday or for the most current coronavirus emergency or, again, for a burst of sales no specific action plan is ready to deal with a possible increase in accesses, your e-commerce will surely suffer slowdowns.
In some cases,complete inaccessibility and, consequently, the loss of possible buyers may occur.
To check whether these situations have already occurred, you can use various tools, such as Google Analytics, and extensively analyse user behaviour before, after and during sales peaks. If your e-commerce does not have such an analysis tool or you have not planned to install one, we have another piece of unpleasant news for you(but this one does not concern e-commerce, but rather those who have chosen not to adopt any analysis system).
What we suggest you analyse specifically is the relationship between peak user period and the speed of your site, and between site speed and purchase action. The results may be surprising, but it may only be the tip of the iceberg: an in-depth analysis, perhaps with an expert, may reveal behaviour of your buyers that you did not know before.
Why is my e-commerce slow?
First of all, let’s define ‘slow’.
One could call into question an infinity of tools such as Google’s Lighthouse which, however, are generally complex since many of their results are subject to different interpretations or in any case it is almost always necessary to appeal to one or more developers to understand the data obtained and act accordingly.
Instead, we want to provide you with a much more practical definition of ‘slow’:
does your e-commerce take longer than two seconds to display something readable on a mobile device that has never opened your platform before?
Does it?
Then your e-commerce is definitely slow. (The test varies depending on the device, connection and geographical location).
If, on the other hand, you are below this threshold: excellent result! The road, however, may still be long. Continuous and planned optimisations are lifeblood for your e-commerce and can bring major increases in sales, so it is worth looking into this further.
Assuming that an e-commerce is not an inanimate object, but a real system always in motion (practically a car that needs frequent servicing and constant improvements to perform at its best), we can identify the most common reasons that slow down your e-commerce:
- Poor quality or insufficient hosting
- E-commerce software with dubious performance
- Low code optimisation
- Outdated or unfit for purpose development and compilation tools
- Too many third-party plugins
These reasons are to be treated as macro-categories, as they contain infinite facets and are cause for study for anyone wishing to begin a technical optimisation of their platform.
To be honest, in order to achieve significant and consistent results it is necessary to know one’s system thoroughly, to be prepared to invest time and money in optimisation, and to have significant experience or a trained technical partner.
Why does my e-commerce slow down when visited by more users than usual?
The main reasons are the lack and misuse of available resources. We have often seen how a single line of code can completely destroy the performance of a site and in this case we call it ‘abuse’. Just as often, we have seen exhausted ecommerce sites that with a simple increase in resources and a more difficult scaling path have partially or completely solved their slowdown problems.
If we want to achieve this kind of result, we must look for a scalable, dynamic system that allows resources to be paid for according to true consumption, but above all one that increases and decreases the available resources according to user peaks, automatically.
Fortunately, thanks to a number of technologies that have now become commonplace, the shortage can be permanently resolved by working on the outcome to mitigate, if not eliminate, the misuse of resources.
What advantages can I gain by speeding up my e-commerce?
The best way to justify such an investment is the economic return, very often immediate, that it has. Almost everyone knows the impact that 100 milliseconds of loading time has on Amazon sales (spoiler: 1%, other spoiler: that’s a lot), so there is no doubt: taking 1 second off your e-commerce loading time would make a big difference to the perception of your possible customer.
Another very good reason is the big favour you do to the SEO of your e-commerce. In fact, Google rewards or penalises websites by placing mobile speed among the top indices of goodness . So, if your site is not yet usable from mobile devices, we have a whole treatise full of bad news for you. If, on the other hand, everything is in order, then it could be interesting to start an optimisation path that could bring your e-commerce to the top positions on Google, substantially increasing sales.
What technologies are recommended to start my optimisation journey?
The choice of technologies requires careful preliminary analysis. Much depends on the software you already use, your management system or simply your expectations.
Often, to get started it is sufficient to understand what JAMStack is and to find out about platforms that allow rational resource management, such as Snipcart, Contentful, Commercelayer. In detail, these are tools for developers, but the various sites contain valuable information on how these systems work.
At other times, for more important e-commerce, this is not enough: more complex distributed platforms are required, perhaps driven by the world-famous Kubernetes from the next shiny technology that will allow you to globally distribute the user load.
Did we raise a lot of questions for you? Send an e-mail to info@palazzinacreativa.it, we will be very happy to help you find an answer!