Shop performance: Important KPIs in e-commerce

Less is more: reduce content and compress files

If you have a lot to carry, you walk slower. What's true in real life can also be a reason for sluggishness in online applications. If the online store is too cluttered, performance will gradually deteriorate. This applies to all types of content (text, images, videos, product data) as well as the structure of the store.

Reducing content and simplifying the shop structure can help if your platform is performing poorly. True to the motto "less is more," you should think carefully about what you need and where. Overloading your offering often not only scares customers away, but also slows down your shop, increases loading times, and thus reduces shop performance.

Furthermore, compressing files can help if it is difficult to reduce the overall amount of data. Some file formats take up less space than others and therefore also reduce loading times. This applies in particular to visual content such as images, videos, graphics, or design elements, which may also be suitable as smaller file formats.

There is also the option of outsourcing audiovisual files to a streaming provider. This takes up less storage space on your own server.

Search engines are convincing: improving user experience

Search engines also scan performance to determine which shops to rank at the top for which industries or products. The search engine takes the customer's position here and carefully considers which shop they would like to "visit." Their favorites come first.

In search engine rankings, every millisecond counts when it comes to shop performance—it's comparable to top-level sports. As is generally known, search engines evaluate the loading time of websites. In addition to criteria such as page structure and user experience, they rank slow shops lower than their faster competitors. This negatively impacts both the visibility and the conversion rate of the online platform.

In this case, it's a "lose-lose situation" for the operator, an SEO downward spiral, because one negative factor influences the other. With improved shop performance, you can not only rank your platform higher, but also improve general factors that positively influence search engine rankings and turn a "lose-lose" situation into a "win-win" situation.

Distance helps: Outsource applications (if possible)

If purely content-based reduction does not help, there is also the option of outsourcing applications on the backend. If many other functions are integrated into the shop system, such as CRM, ERP, or similar, it may help to outsource these. This means that the shop itself only has to deal with the frontend and the shop database.

Here, you must note that outsourcing such components has no impact on usability and thus the user experience. Separating such components can ultimately lead to missing information for a smooth processing procedure for the customer. Although this has no lasting impact on shop performance, it does affect customer loyalty. And, as we all know, customer loyalty is something that needs to be improved in any case.

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Keep your head in the clouds: Switch providers as needed

A slow or poor server can also be a reason for performance problems. If these are temporary problems, there may be a short-term and acute reason on the part of the server or hosting provider. If the problems are persistent or steadily worsening, switching to another provider is one way to improve the shop's performance (again).

Cloud-based hosting is often recommended here. In addition to faster performance, cloud applications also offer better reliability and better "crisis management" in the event that an application should ever crash completely.

Cloud-based hosting not only improves shop performance in the long term, but also increases usability thanks to its reliability, which in turn improves the user experience.

The most important information at a glance:

Summary of the most important aspects