User Experience simply refers to a user’s interaction with your website. How can you deliver the best possible user experience? By making the flow as natural and intuitive as possible. A website has good UX if it’s easy to use and meets the needs of the user.
For an e-commerce website, a great user experience is essential if you want your customer to:
- Make a purchase
- Return to your website
- Recommend it to others
User Experience is arguably the single most important thing in e-Commerce. A functionally rich website coupled with ease use leaves the user with a “good experience”. But is that all? No, consider on how to limit bandwidth usage & load speed. If Amazon were to have amazing design, great functionality and superb user experience but couldn’t load fast enough, would you stay? In all probability, no. Website load speed is critical to user experience.
For an information website, user experience will be enhanced if there is:
- Ease of finding information
- Logical flow to the website
- Help is readily available through FAQs etc.
Here are a few ways you can limit bandwidth usage & improve load speeds on your website:
1. Choose superfast CDN – The CDN providers you choose is key to load speed. Make sure you pick a provider who has data servers closest to your service. This decreases latency and improves image load speed. Superfast CDN hosting for static content will boost your image loading speed.
2. Caching for static and dynamic content: Caching captures your last known information and displays it to a user instead of freshly loading a page with its images, content, text, videos which increases load speed. An alternative is to build in caching for your website – gifs and videos included. Caching heavy, less important elements of your webpage and using caching like Varnish enables you to boost your website load speed.
3. Build Ajax calls of peripheral elements: Save bandwidth, server time and improve speed with this short-cut. Opt to build Ajax calls for elements that are not critical to your website to make it available on-demand for your user instead of loading separate pages each time. This not only enables your website to load faster but also consumers less of your users’ bandwidth.
Here is an example for your reference.
4. Optimization such as Minifying Jquery, HTML, CSS: Clean your code. Eliminate coding in unnecessary calls which increase load time each time there is a command. Install Jquery.min on your own server – it’s much lighter and smaller & will certainly decrease your load time.
5. Optimization of SQL queries: Optimize your queries so as to reduce the number of steps your user will take to get the results he wants. Some tips you can follow are to:
- Only retrieve data you absolutely need
- Index properly
- Do away with correlated subqueries
- Check your codes before you use them especially if they’re ready-made/ borrowed codes
- Try to avoid dynamic SQL
6. Opt to use multiple servers: To reduce the usage of bandwidth and RAM of a single server which would reduce your load speed, use cluster of servers as load balancers instead. This is especially useful for websites with high traffic.
7. Optimize your server: Regularly run crons to flush out cache, in-line scripts and clean your servers. Think of the function of the apps you use to clean your mobiles without which, your phone speed would reduce – Clean Master, CCleaner, Startup Manager.
8. Build a good database architecture: Organise your tables and structure correctly so your commands can read and write correctly. A mixed-up or hard to read architecture only increases your load speed.
Many high traffic, well-known websites like Amazon, Flipkart, Google, Facebook use these web development techniques to increase or sustain their high load speed. For websites like those, business runs on the sheer volume of traffic and load speed is critical.
Hope this post of ours will help you limit bandwidth usage on your website for better load time and UX.
Got more tips? We’d love to hear from you in the comment section below.
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