40% of the visitors abandon a website if it does not load within the first 3 seconds! This should be a wakeup call for all the webmasters out there.

To put things simply – speed is critical. The patience of online users is dwindling. They want faster websites, highly responsive page navigation, and fluid-smooth user experience when they visit websites. The benchmark for page loading time is 2.5 seconds. Businesses who ensure faster loading times are guaranteed immediate rewards in terms of increased conversions. It is estimated that an ecommerce business that is generating sales of $100,000 every day witnesses a $7,000 boost in revenues simply by reducing the page loading time by 1 second.

Odoo ecommerce is optimized to deliver a fast response time and load at blistering speeds. However, there are an endless number of front end as well as back end aspects that affect the response time of the server. Unless these factors are optimized for performance, your Odoo ecommerce website cannot meet the expectations of your customers. So, here are some of the factors that affect the service response time, and how they can be addressed.

Decrease the Distance
This is the most obvious and basic factor. The server response time is directly proportional to the distance between your website user and the server’s location. The more is the distance between them, the longer is the server response time. So, when hosting your website, pick a hosting service that has servers closer to your most users’ location.

Manage the Server’s Resources to Meet the Demand
The server that is hosting your website comes with a limited ability to support a fixed amount of activity by your users. Its configuration such as the processor type, number of processors, ram size, bandwidth, operating system, and many other factors determine how many users’ activity can be supported simultaneously at any given point in time. As your business grows, you need to upgrade your server’s hardware configuration or purchase a better hosting package to accommodate your growth. Otherwise, the overloaded server may dramatically bring down the server response time.

Optimize the Database
Database is where all the information on your website is stored. The database must be easily accessible. It must be easy to manage it, edit it, update it, and use it. If the database’s design is complex, then the server will take more time to process the requests it receives from the users. Businesses can optimize their database by simplifying it, by removing unnecessary data from it, and by ensuring that it is easily accessible to the users.

Minimize HTTP Requests
A bulk of the website’s traffic is consumed by HTTP requests. If you have many images, CSS, scripts, stylesheets, videos, and other such elements, then the loading page sends a separate request to the server for each such element. The more are such components, the more is the time taken by the server to deliver all of them to the users’ screen. Minimizing HTTP requests is known to dramatically improve the page loading time. In this case, the server response time is not reduced. But the sheer number of components reduces the page loading time, even though the server response time is good.

Reduce Dynamic Content
Static content includes all the data that is hardcoded onto a webpage. Components such as images, HTML, CSS, text, and everything else on the webpage remains the same, irrespective of the user’s actions on the webpage. Dynamic pages have components that are interactive. Depending on the users’ inputs, the different content is loaded on the webpage. Dynamic pages take a lot more time to load.

In the case of static content, the server loads the same content every time without customizing it. Therefore, the process is significantly faster. It is strongly recommended that businesses use dynamic webpages only when absolutely necessary and stick to static pages in most cases. They’ll then experience their Odoo ecommerce website performing at impressive speeds.

Conclusion
The average size of webpages has hit 3MB and is set to touch the 4MB mark in 2019. That’s colossal by webpage standards. Imagine the experience of a user who is using a smartphone and data connection to access such webpages. It will take more than 10 seconds for such webpages to load on their device, by which time they’ll have already opened new tabs. Ideally, webpages must be 500KB or smaller in order to work at the blistering speeds that the internet users have grown accustomed to. This is including all the images, fonts, stylesheets, and everything else. Businesses that achieve this magic number will experience a significant boost in their conversions rates.