The holidays are almost here and everyone is gearing up for Christmas, personally and professionally. If you run an ecommerce business, you’re likely to ensure that your landing pages are prefect and your website is working just fine before you get ready to capitalise on the surge in holiday sales.

What if the traffic is so heavy that your website becomes excruciatingly slow, or worse still, crashes?  Visitors are impatient and expect websites to load quickly so that they can finish their business and move on.  Your site’s speed has a direct impact on your return on investment as it affects bounce rates, your conversion rates, revenue and user experience.

To make sure your visitors stay on your site and respond to your calls to action, here are seven ways to tweak your website and make it deliver its best performance this Christmas.

Avoid HTTP request overload

Probably the number one performance deterrent, HTTP request overload can be resolved by combining multiple script files, style sheets and CSS files into a single file. Next, gather your site graphics, templates, themes and navigation into one image file.  Using CSS, be selective about displaying images where relevant. Pare down the number of images or bundle the necessary ones into an e-catalog on your site. Keep your site design as simple as you can to prevent it from slowing down.

HTML markup

This should be efficient. Statistics show that user bandwidth is not always the cause for slow site loading time. Often the html markup is the problem that affects the browser’s behavior. By managing the html properly, this can be avoided. Load scripts intelligently, or the user’s browser will freeze.

Take advantage of browser cache and local storage

Make use of local storage especially if your browser supports HTML5. This lets you store more on the client without weighing down every request.

Don’t use third party widgets

As far as possible avoid third party widgets.  Utilise async implementation to avoid affecting site performance. Some widgets can slow down the entire website, driving the user away.

Handle byte overload

This can be tackled by editing the content, optimizing images, minimizing JavaScript and CSS, pagination, Ajax, and using cookie-free domains.  Cookie-less domains.

Use a Global Network

Geography is important.  Use a cloud provider to tackle your content so that users can pull content from a server closest to them to save time.

Measure each of your website tweaks and optimise performance. Eventually, it is performance that will keep a prospect your side during the holidays.