E-commerce performance is essential when selecting an e-commerce platform. If you have an online e-commerce presence, it is vital to your success in the market.
Over the years, broadband has become faster and rendering content on modern devices is faster than ever. But have e-commerce sites gotten any faster? Sadly no, according to research by Radware. The top 500 American retail sites are 16% slower than the year before. The average e-commerce website's load time has increased from 7.36 seconds to 8.56 seconds. E-commerce frameworks are growing bigger. And there is a trend of quickly solving problems by using third party libraries.
The most used CMS systems are also the most attacked platforms by hackers. Complex frameworks can be time consuming to learn and hiring a freelancer can be a greater expense. Big frameworks with a lot of third party components is more code needing to be kept up to date. Slow decision making or inconsistent coding can be the result of a project backed by a large number of different developers.
We will give you a glimpse into how the design and extreme performance of LiteCart compares to other e-commerce platforms. And why this can be a great advantage for you.
The file size of the distributed package for installing may give you the impression about how feature rich an e-commerce platform is. However, that's not necessarily true. It can be an indicator of how over-developed the platform is. Or how big it grew because of embedded third party libraries.
LiteCart is feature rich and virtually free from third party libraries. The distributed package size is super tiny. Because we code our own libraries and dependencies instead of embedding other packages, everything is as streamlined as possible. That is the minimalistic thinking that makes LiteCart super tiny.
After installing Litecart, you will have a solid application without any unnecessary stuff that comes with distributed packages. This is a pure platform without any additions or extensions.
The amount of space needed for running LiteCart is super small. That makes it possible to run the platform even on the smallest web host storage. Even a Raspberry Pi computer can run LiteCart!
The number of files in a platform indicates how many different scripts it consists of. Over-developed platforms quickly escalate in the number of files. But it can also be due to clumsy framework design.
We try to avoid breaking up features into several puzzling files. Because of the minimalistic design of LiteCart's code, features are usually built and suited on a per file basis. That makes it easy to find code, easy to distinguish, and easy to maintain for the future.
Are your customers waiting patiently for your pages to load? A page load under 2 seconds today is considered good. Up to 4 seconds can be considered acceptable depending on the business. But tests have shown that anything after 4 seconds, the visitor drop-out rate starts to rise exponentially. A merchant can lose up to 25% of their online visitors if page loading takes more than 4 seconds. If you are not unique on the market, chances are you could be missing out on a big chunk of visitors from your slow performing website.
LiteCart is so fast, most pages load in milliseconds.
Every time you visit a website, there are additional requests made to the web server to load the contents of a page. This includes anything like javascripts, stylesheets, images, fonts, videos, etc. The loading of these components is part of the page load wait time. More components can extend the network time spent.
LiteCart tries to stay free from third party libraries. That way we only need to serve the components that are absolutely needed. This keeps the number of sub-requests made during page loads to a minimum.
The page size is the total amount of byte data transferred when loading a web page. The page source, images, and scripts can be optimized. But in the end, size matters. Apple's iPhone will not cache components larger than 25 Kb in uncompressed mode. So your e-commerce website needs to be slim. And for mobile devices it needs to be even smaller.
LiteCart has an unbelievably small CSS framework. And using minification and compression it gets even smaller. With other great features like image optimizing and webp support, we make sure your embedded resources are no larger than they need to be.