A Better Customer UX With BigCommerce CDNs

As you know, time is money in a manufacturing business. The longer it takes to produce an item, the costlier it becomes. It’s the same for an eCommerce business except time refers to site speed. The longer the pages take to load, the more likely customers will abandon it.

It’s critical to your eCommerce business that pages load as fast as possible regardless of your server’s and shopper’s locations. BigCommerce developers know site speed is crucial for a positive shopper’s experience, and you’re about to see why etailers have a significant advantage with BigCommerce’s CDN.

A one-second delay in page load time has been shown to cause a 7% loss in conversion and 11% fewer page views. For an online store earning $50,000 a day, that one-second delay adds up to more than $1 million in lost sales each year.

BigCommerce

And It’s not just site speed that customers want. They also demand reliability. If a site crashes, it’s bad business for everyone.

Keeping all your website “eggs” in one basket is risky. Reliability and security are where a CDN (Content Delivery Network) comes into play. With a CDN, there are copies of the website in different servers around the world. This redundancy helps protect the contents of the origin server. It also helps to avoid spikes in traffic that lead to crashes and reduces downtime which we will explain in a moment.

What is a CDN and How Does It Improve Your Site Speed?

A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a group of different servers located around the world referred to as PoP (Point of Presence). Each CDN PoP responds to users who are closest to that geolocation.

Let’s take Amazon for example. If two people search for the same item, one in London and one in Adelaide, the closest server in the network will supply the information. By using the local PoPs, it lowers the network latency and response time.

Why A CDN Improves Customer User Experience

CDNs do more than caching and delivering static web content. They provide stores with global coverage and enhance performance for shoppers in the countries they serve. CDN’s automatically seek the best route for data transfer and offer data security.

Site speed is one of the most critical metrics in the user experience, especially on mobile. Bounce rates are in direct proportion to page load times. Up to 40% of shoppers will abandon their carts if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. The main reason for slow site speed, besides bandwidth, is distance.

BigCommerce’s CDN has helped mitigate this issue by building 20 data centers around the world. Some of the largest are in London, Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Although the main centers are in Seattle and Dallas, customers will receive their data from the server closest to them resulting in very short page load times.

Of course, It’s all handled behind the scenes. The customer doesn’t know or care, where their pages originate. They only want their information fast and why BigCommerce designers use them.

Another significant advantage of a CDN is that it controls large spikes in site traffic from a viral event or promotion. The overflow traffic will automatically redirect to other servers reducing load times and preventing server crashes.

Checked Your Page Load Times Lately?

Sampling page load times is easy by installing Google Analytics for free, or other paid sites. BigCommerce stores have Google Analytics included.

The speed measurements are averages taken from the shopper’s browser. Results depend on their physical location (distance from the nearest PoP) and the quality of their connection.

Now that Google has begun using page speed in mobile search ranking for all websites, it’s in your company’s best interest to leverage BigCommerce’s CDN to minimize mobile page load times.

Higher Network Latency = Low Conversions

Network latency refers to the delays in transmitting or processing data. Without the advantage of CDN’s, users would wait too long for their files to load from just one or two servers. According to Kissmetrics, 52% of shoppers say that page loading speed is essential to their site loyalty.

As eCommerce businesses expand to serve customers around the world, engage voice commerce, and send larger media files, CDNs become vital to improving site speed metrics. A website’s performance directly affects a shopper’s behavior, increases conversion rates and profits. Ask a BigCommerce development agency if you need help setting it up.

No Slowdown, No Downtime, and No Crash

If your store is already on BigCommerce, the CDN is already included and enabled for all plans. All the files, images, and other assets are stored in one of three folders, the template folder, product images/uploaded images folder, and the content folder. Keep in mind that the template folder is the only one using the CDN. It’s highly recommended to store all static assets there for fastest page loads.

CDNs provide security through redundancy. They also reduce costs by eliminating the need to own and maintain the infrastructure of multiple global servers.

BigCommerce stores can scale much faster on a global level without worrying about data or bandwidth consumption. The redundancies built into CDNs allow them to handle any amount of traffic to the site without slowdown, crashing or down times.

BigCommerce Enterprise reports a 99.99% server up-time and “100% up-time during Cyber Week for four years straight.”

If you’re ready to scale up and take advantage of CDNs for your store, Eventige is an Elite BigCommerce Agency Partner. We provide professional BigCommerce development services as well as eCommerce marketing to help you scale.