You’ve spent time and effort crafting an enticing store to sell tickets for your event.
But when your customers click the “Buy Tickets” button, they’re met with a sluggish loading page that feels like an eternity.
Frustrating, right?
The probability of a user abandoning a purchase increases by 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds.
That’s why minimizing loading times is crucial for your store’s conversion rate and selling tickets online.
In this article, we’ll reveal 8 speed optimization strategies that will give your ticket store the boost it needs for lightning-fast performance.
Strategy 1: Test Your Ticket Store Page Speed
Testing your page load speed helps you understand how quickly your web pages load. It can also help you identify any performance issues that are slowing down your ticket store.
PageSpeed Insights is a useful tool by Google that you can use to analyze your website speed.
Once on the PageSpeed Insights website, you’ll see a text field where you can enter the URL of your website.
Click the “Analyze” button and PageSpeed Insights will test your webpage and provide a page speed score.
You’ll see performance metrics and speed optimization suggestions to improve your webpage’s load time.
Focus on the “Largest Contentful Paint” (LCP) metric.
LCP measures the time it takes for the largest content element on your page to become visible to users. It’s a crucial indicator of perceived site speed.
You can see your page speed score for both mobile and desktop users. Mobile users are more impatient, so reducing loading times should be a top priority.
Discover how to sell more tickets to smartphone users in our ticket store mobile optimization guide.
What Is a Good Page Load Time for an Online Ticket Store?
The ideal page load time for an online ticket store is up to 2 seconds. If your site takes longer than 3 seconds to load, you’ll increase the risk of visitors leaving your store before they purchase a ticket.
Strategy 2: Implement Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Have you ever wondered how you can reduce the distance between your customers and your ticket store?
The answer is a Content Delivery Network (CDN).
A CDN distributes your files across multiple servers worldwide. This allows your customers to access content from the server that is geographically closest to them.
Source: Gtmetrix
This minimizes the physical distance the data needs to travel, resulting in significantly faster loading time.
With a CDN, your ticket store will be ready to serve customers at lightning speed.
Strategy 3: Leverage Browser Caching
Lots of people won’t convert the first time they visit your ticket store. They want to check out the details of your event before committing to buying a ticket.
When these people return, they don’t want to find that every page element must load from scratch again.
This can be a significant barrier to online ticket sales.
But it’s also an easy problem to fix.
By leveraging browser caching, you can store certain elements of your ticket store locally on your customers’ devices.
Source: PressIdium
This means that customer visits will be faster the second time, as the cached elements are loaded quickly.
Installing a plugin or app is the easiest way to implement browser caching.
If you’re using WordPress, WP Fastest Cache or WP Rocket are good options. These plugins are simple to install and configure.
To optimize Shopify store speed, get an app like RT: Page Speed Booster or Swift SEO Page Speed Optimizer. You can find these Shopify speed optimization tools in the app Store.
Strategy 4: Compress Files
Imagine you’re going on a trip and have a suitcase to pack all your things.
You want to fit as many items as possible into the suitcase, so you need to be clever about how you pack them.
File compression is like packing a suitcase for your ticket store files. But, instead of clothes and toiletries, you have digital images, videos, and text.
Like a suitcase, you want to make these files as small as possible to save space. This is vital for image optimization and making your store load faster.
You can use GZIP compression to reduce the file size without compromising functionality.
The compression technique finds parts of the file that are repeated or not really needed and removes or simplifies them. For example, CSS and JavaScript files often contain whitespace, comments, and redundant code.
By doing this, the file becomes smaller in size.
Smaller files mean quicker load times and a snappier ticket-purchasing experience.
Google says that using GZIP compression can reduce the size of the transferred response by up to 90%.
You can use a free tool like GiftOfSpeed to test your ticket store.
In some cases, your hosting provider or eCommerce platform will already have GZIP enabled.
You can use a free plugin like W3 Total Cache if you need to add compression to your WordPress ticket store.
Strategy 5: Optimize Server Response Time
A slow server response time can be a major buzzkill for ticket store loading speed.
When a user requests a page from your server, the time it takes for the server to process the request and deliver the response dramatically impacts the overall user experience.
By optimizing server response time, you can ensure that your ticket store loads quickly.
The easiest way to boost server performance is to upgrade your hosting.
Some hosting providers provide much faster server response times than others. You can see how your hosting provider stacks up in the table below:
Source: Tooltester
Look for a hosting provider that utilizes SSDs (Solid-State Drives).
Like your laptop storage, SSD hosting uses flash memory to store and retrieve data, unlike HDDs that rely on spinning magnetic disks.
SSDs have much faster read and write speeds. This means that web pages, images, and other site content loads more quickly from an SSD.
Many hosting providers offer separate plans, specifically highlighting the use of SSDs for enhanced performance.
Strategy 6: Streamline Your Ticket Store Checkout Process
The checkout process is a critical moment in the ticket-buying journey. Any barriers or delays can lead to abandoned carts.
According to the latest research from Baymard, a long or complicated checkout process at ecommerce stores is one of the biggest causes of cart abandonment:
Source: Baymard Institute
To combat this, streamline your checkout process.
Minimize the number of steps and simplify the ticket purchase process to make it as frictionless as possible.
First, you can reduce the number of form fields required during the checkout process. Only ask for essential information necessary to complete the purchase.
You should also consider implementing address lookup functionality to auto-fill address details, reducing the need for manual input.
A great way to simplify your checkout process is to use TicketsCandy.
This ticketing platform has a user-friendly widget to your website, a dedicated event page and a simplified two-step checkout process.
You can also connect your Square merchant account to accept online payments from all major credit cards and mobile wallets.
TicketsCandy makes it easy to speed up your online store and sell tickets online.
Strategy 7: Implement Lazy Loading
You know when you visit a website, and it takes forever to load?
It’s usually because tons of images, videos, and other content needs to load before you can interact with the page.
Lazy loading solves that problem.
Instead of loading everything at once, lazy loading allows the website to only load the elements immediately visible when you first land on the page.
You don’t have to wait for everything to load at once. Instead, the primary content is prioritized, and secondary elements are loaded progressively as the user interacts with the page.
The easiest way to implement lazy loading is to use a plugin or app specifically designed for this purpose.
These tools typically provide a range of options to configure lazy loading based on your specific requirements.
Source: WordPress
Smush and a3 Lazy Load are good options if you use WordPress for your ticket store. And if you want to improve your Shopify page load speed, head to the App Store and install TinyIMG or Lazify.
Strategy 8: Continuous Performance Monitoring and Testing
Website speed optimization is more than just a one-and-done task.
Continuous performance monitoring and testing can help you proactively address performance issues and maintain a fast-loading store.
Use PageSpeed Insights to track load times and identify any bottlenecks.
You can also conduct stress testing to simulate heavy traffic using a tool like Loader.io.
This can be super useful if you expect a spike in traffic and high demand for your event tickets once they go on sale.
Need some help building hype for your event? Check out our guide on how to use social media to sell tickets online.
Wrapping Up
Every second counts when it comes to selling tickets online.
By implementing these 8 speed optimization strategies, you’ll leave sluggish page loading times in the dust.
If you want to sell more tickets for your event, use TicketsCandy to create a faster and more enjoyable experience for your customers.
Creating an event page and issuing tickets from a user-friendly dashboard is super easy.
You can keep 100% of your ticket revenue and reduce the amount of fees your customers have to pay.