It’s easy to get carried away in any one direction when it comes to eCommerce. For a lot of people, it’s SEO. Other people go nuts with social 
media. However, it’s important that you give every aspect of your eCommerce business the attention it deserves. The speed at which your webpages are able to load is a great example of this.
If you’ve ever had the displeasure of dealing with a website that loads slowly, you already know what a problem this is. Now imagine what that would do to a customer trying to make a purchase, especially one who understands there are other websites they can try. Think about a customer who is already unsure about the purchase. Those are customers you can count on losing.
First, test out your website. You can visit it yourself or use a number of free services online that will provide you with its current speed. Conventional wisdom says if a page doesn’t load within three seconds, you’ll likely lose the visitor.
One thing a lot of sites could probably benefit from is changing the sizes of many of their images. The bigger they are, the longer it takes to load them. If you need large images because they show products, consider smaller thumbnails they can click on for a pop-up of a bigger image. This alone could have a huge effect on the webpage in question.
Think about all the plugins you’re using too. So many sound amazing and are free, so you may have added a quite a lot. Unfortunately, a large number of plugins can also slow your site down. Consider the most useful ones and ditch the rest.
Another great idea is to enable compression. Doing this will decrease how many bytes get sent over a network per page. Depending on the server you’re using, there are a number of options for compression software.
Lastly, if you’ve done all of the above and are still suffering from slow load rates, it may be time to reevaluate your web host or the package you’ve signed up for. Either may just not be enough for what you need. It’s not unheard of for companies to essentially keep their same website, but find that it’s slowed down as they become more popular/busy. This happens a lot with shared hosting. So it might be time to evolve.
Slow loading times are a lousy way to lose business. Check to see if it takes more than three seconds per page and, if it does, implement the above methods for speeding things up.
Source:
http://www.hostway.com/blog/10-ways-to-make-your-website-load-faster/