Cloudflare to the rescue: how to make a slow online store fast again

Studies show that users wait only three seconds on average for a web page to load. For online retailers, that moment is critical, because it decides whether a potential customer stays on the site to make a purchase later.

According to Margus Eha, CEO of Opus, an online shop’s home page is where consumers form their first impression of the shop. “A page that opens without delay shows that you are dealing with a modern and trustworthy company, whereas a slow e-shop signals that the visitor’s time isn’t valued,” he said. Google also puts a lot of weight on page speed, using it to rank search results.

“This has a direct effect on sales as well – more than ten years ago, for example, Amazon calculated that a page loading just one second slower would cost it 1.6 billion dollars in lost revenue,” Eha added.

He says Estonian retailers have gradually started to pay more attention to the speed of their sites, but it is quite common to get lost in the details when tackling the problem. “For example, people start optimising image sizes, trimming lines of code or looking for ways to speed up server responses. Although these methods can help, they often take a lot of time and resources,” he said.

In fact, there are much simpler solutions and services for making a website faster. One of them is Cloudflare, which uses servers located all over the world to speed up page loading, reduce the load on the server and ensure a smooth user experience, without having to optimise every tiny detail by hand.

How does it work?

Opus makes extensive use of headless solutions, in which Cloudflare plays a central role. In a headless architecture, the website’s frontend and backend processes are separated, and content such as images and product descriptions is pre-rendered and stored on Cloudflare’s cache servers.

“This means that most user requests are answered directly from Cloudflare’s servers. That reduces the load on the main servers and the site always opens quickly. Since most visitors see the same elements, the server doesn’t have to regenerate the same information for every request – and that noticeably speeds up page loading,” Eha described.

Many retailers often face a situation where the website runs smoothly most of the time, but starts to freeze under heavier traffic during sales campaigns, or crashes altogether. “In such situations the reaction is often to increase server capacity temporarily, but using Cloudflare can actually be a much better option,” Eha noted. “You should ask yourself how your shop’s website behaved during E-Monday or Black Friday. If it couldn’t cope with the load, Cloudflare will definitely help, because it removes the need to scale servers.”

In addition to scaling problems, Cloudflare takes care of complex legal and security checks that require constant data exchange between the web server and the backend systems. This is done using workers, which allow quick background checks in the cloud without affecting the loading speed of the whole page. For example, stock queries, price calculations and data protection requests can all be handled in the cloud.

Opus has been using Cloudflare to optimise websites for several years and has made many online shops and CMS systems faster as a result. “One good example is Äripäev, whose site now runs just as nimbly during breaking news as on any ordinary day,” Eha said.

“So Cloudflare is a technically fast and cost-effective way to speed up your website. If you feel your online shop doesn’t meet today’s standards for speed, get in touch and we’ll find the right solution together,” Eha concluded.