Optimizing Your International Mobile Performance

Clarity Connect Provides the API Endpoints to Integrate your Marketplace with Any Front or Back-Office System
Finding the Right Solution Unique to Your Business

Creating a Mobile-Friendly Experience for All Your Users

Once you start expanding your eCommerce business internationally, you discover the strengths and weaknesses of your platform. Some of these arise from the fact that in a lot of regions, mobile is the primary source of user interaction with eCommerce platforms.

However, another reason is that certain countries are not equipped with the best technology. So, the interface and functionality of your platform might get affected in certain regions even after you optimize it for low screen resolutions or low bandwidth. Therefore, keeping in mind the possibility of general technological challenges in third world countries during optimization is also essential.

Regardless, it is always beneficial to optimize your platform for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. These generally have a limited bandwidth than a typical laptop or desktop. In this article, we talk about some of the things you can do to make sure your international eCommerce platform is mobile-friendly.

Reducing User Bounce Rate

Site Loading Speed

Mobile optimization does not only involve the presentation. It also includes the load speed and overall performance.

The only way to improve the loading speed of your platform is through testing. You need to go through performance testing and validation. It is always the most straightforward alterations that can make a massive difference to your platform’s performance on mobile devices in remote regions.

Differentiating Between Solutions

Comparing Cloud vs. CDNs

When there is traffic coming from international locations, the typical hosting scenario involves a single host or a cluster in a single environment. Cloud infrastructure can then propagate the data.

Let’s say you have just started expanding your eCommerce business internationally. The headquarters, as well as the hosting, is based in the U.S. Ultimately, your international customers will have to reach the U.S. server to access your eCommerce platform. When there is only one locale, the global latency can be pretty high. The regional latency can range from a few hundred milliseconds to 1000 milliseconds. So, at least half a second to a second of delay occurs just due to latency. For global latency, this can go up to 1-2 seconds or even longer.

Latency refers to the delay in communication between the user’s browser and the webserver. Essentially, it is the time taken to request data and get a response from the servers. It is not necessarily the same as the load time of a platform.

Content delivery networks or CDNs can help businesses without enough resources to set up a cloud infrastructure. They are a globally distributed network of web servers. The best part, they cost significantly less than the cloud.

CDNs can house the core components of a platform. These include the images, script files, CSS files, etc. All of these are cached. The information is then cast through data centers that are the nearest from where the request is originating.

You can say that content delivery networks serve as a “broker” to this cache data before the server gets that request. So the data is somewhere in between a user’s browser and the webserver. When the browser requests for the data, the content delivery network will quickly give it to the end-user from a local data center.

Ultimately, the benefit of content delivery networks is that the end-user gets instant results. Since the local data center is closer to its location, it ensures a better experience. Thus, CDNs can be helpful for mobile optimization as no re-downloading of big files is required. They do not have to wait for latency since files are not coming from far-off locations. Even if there is a slow connection, at least they will not have to wait for the files to load forever. It can be a huge deal to have to wait multiple seconds before the site loads. Some users might find it off-putting enough to leave the site.

Creating Site Advantages

Site-Wide Performance

A site that loads rapidly and performs well has many advantages. Therefore, a significant aspect of mobile optimization is making sure your platform’s performance is up to par. You have to keep in mind the regions that may not be able to view your site effectively. They might not have the ability to transfer data that goes over the limits of their particular mobile device.

So, while evaluating your international eCommerce platform, we encourage you to determine the components of mobile performance that require improvement. It is the only way to optimize and improve the performance of your site for mobile devices.

After you make changes, rigorous testing is required. Fortunately, Clarity’s team incorporates this feature in our international eCommerce platforms. We provide an attentive set of testing to clients who want to improve the performance of their platforms. This testing allows us to customize the platform to ensure the end-user is getting low latency and the best performance. These features are very crucial in any platform as they enable users to perform transactions seamlessly. In turn, this results in a high conversion rate.

How Can Clarity Help

Clarity International eCommerce Experts

If you have any more questions related to this topic, we encourage you to reach out to our experienced team. They can provide a complimentary analysis. Or answer any questions about the next step in the process. We certainly look forward to answering your questions and talking with you about your upcoming international eCommerce project.

As you plan how to expand your eCommerce platform internationally, we encourage you to go through the resources below. Some of these can be helpful for your project.

Until Next Time...