March 31, 2011
Guest Post by Jimmy Rodriguez, CTO and co-founder of 3DCart
Online merchants are moving towards hosted ecommerce solutions as the only way to catch up with the constant need for new marketing features, built-in SEO, support for new payment or shipping solutions.
In opting towards a hosted ecommerce platform, merchants should first realize that one of the most valuable resources for an SaaS ecommerce solution is bandwidth. A specific limit is assigned for monthly usage, and additional fees apply when bandwidth consumption goes beyond the monthly limit—usually $5 to $25 per additional GB.
Based on continuous optimization performed for more than 10,000 merchants and built-in techniques developed to reduce bandwidth usage, we have put together a list of tips to get the most out of your online store bandwidth allowance.
1. Measure the weight of your pages
The first step to optimize your site is to understand where the bandwidth is used. Each element on your site has weight, and the total weight of each page, multiplied by the number of visitors, equals what counts towards your bandwidth. Using Firefox as your browser and installing the Yslow add-on from Yahoo, you’ll be able to easily understand the size of each element on your website.
2. Optimize your images
In many cases, the images used as part of your online store design, and for your products, are not optimized towards bandwidth usage. Only experienced web designers know how to provide the best quality while reducing the file size to the minimum. Using .jpg, .gif and .png (instead of .bmp or .tif) is recommended because these allow for better compression. A tool called Smush.it™ helps you quickly find out how much you can save by compressing your images.
3. Use free video, document and image hosting.
You can take advantage of external sites that will allow you to upload your content for free and use embedded or linked content within your online store. There are many advantages to this, including free bandwidth, improved website performance, wider content availability in other channels, etc. The services most commonly used are YouTube.com, Google Video and Vimeo for video, Flickr.com and Photobucket.com for images, and Scribd.com or SlideShare.com for PDF and other documents.
4. Control third party services that interact with your online store.
The use of security scans, order management software, shopping bots and other web services is very common for ecommerce sites. When subscribing to any service that will interact with your online store, check how they will connect to your website and how often will they do it. In most cases, you can control the frequency and content that services like McAfee Secure, Control Scan, Stone Edge, Order Motion, Shop.com, etc. will access your site. Remember that all these use your bandwidth, and a connection to your API every 5 minutes to update inventory will increase your monthly usage.
5. Create a Mobile version of your site.
The traffic from mobile visitors has increased since the dawn of iPhones, smartphones, iPads and other web-enabled mobile devices. Having a mobile store empowers you to take advantage of these visitors by delivering an optimized version of your online store, simultaneously creating a light version of your website that would require a minimum percentage of bandwidth compared to viewing the full version of your site.
6. Upload Images via FTP
Check with your ecommerce hosting provider if FTP uploads and downloads count towards your monthly bandwidth limits. A select number of ecommerce providers actually exclude this from the bandwidth allowance to allow store owners to work freely on their online stores. The FTP can be use to upload and download images in batch in the same way you would update the CSS and HTML of the website.
About the Author:
Jimmy Rodriguez is CTO and co-founder of 3DCart, developer of an ecommerce suite for businesses of all sizes. As an authority on ecommerce best practices, Jimmy combines more than 8 years as an ecommerce developer and web programmer with SEO, social marketing and business intelligence.
Every once in awhile we will have guest authors write for our news as well. These guest authors are always experts in the industry and we require that they write from a non-bias point of view, unless the content is noted as an OpEd piece. If you would like to be a guest author on our site, please contact admin at zippycart.com. Anyone who would like to become a regular guest author has the option of being featured on this page.
