HTML To Opencart

HTML to Opencart is the first step for moving your business online. Opencart is a well-known platform in the field of e-commerce and it is high in demand these days. It is one of the finest, lightweight and fully customizable open source e-commerce platform.

You can download it for free of cost from its website and start working with it. It is really a critical task to convert your HTML pages to Opencart themes. There are lots of people in the market which can claim this conversion. But are they really capable of delivering all the Web Standards for Opencart themes development?

Anyone running an online business should be really careful about these W3C standards. Let us briefly discuss some points which you should take care of, before thinking of a theme conversion.

As you know, the Web is flooded with lots of e-commerce websites during the last few years. And the competition for each product is really high for sale.

Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) only shows those results on the first page, which are highly search engine optimized. And if your website is on the second page, you can consider your business to be dead. As everyone prefers to check out links from the first page only.

So While designing your Opencart theme, Search engine optimization is the super important thing to consider. There are a lot of SEO practices to improve SERP rankings for your page.

You might be having one of the best collection of products to offer on the internet but if you are not following the right SEO practices, you will face lower click-through rates (CTR).

What is CTR?

Click-through rate (CTR) is calculated by dividing the number of users which viewed a link with the number of users that visited that link. The links which have high relevance and a high CTR displays on the top in SERP listings.

Use of Rich snippets and Schema markups helps in displaying only the relevant and important information on search pages. You should also keep your Meta title and Meta description to be very specific and precise.   

It is not an unknown fact now, that web designs which are more compatible with Mobile devices are earning more users and customers. Approximately 5 billion people around the world are having a mobile device today and the number of internet users has already reached around 4 billion people.

So, it is really necessary to keep the mobility in mind for improving your sales conversion rate. You should focus on your website’s compatibility and performance for mobiles. The better experience your website will give to a mobile user, the more your business will grow.

Two key trending frameworks for enhancing the mobility of a Website are:

• Accelerated Mobile Pages
• Progressive Web Apps

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Accelerated mobile pages (AMP) is a super useful framework which gives a set of standards for mobile pages. And It is helpful in enabling fast page rendering and content delivery. AMP loads data from Google CDN. It is also supported by various publishers like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

A webpage or an ad which is published with AMP format delivers a highly smooth and more engaging experience to the mobile users. Any AMP enabled page can be identified with a Thunder Icon on it.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA)

As it is quite obvious to have network issues in certain conditions. Progressive Web App (PWA) works on the offline first approach. These apps store the content when the network is available and provide a pretty good user experience even if the internet is unavailable.

Progressive web apps are so quick to load that user gets amazed at the experience. These apps can work with both mobile and desktop. You can check the Pinterest and its mobile app to feel the experience of a progressive web app. These apps are highly reliable, fast and engaging.

Certain things affect and slow down the speed of page rendering. It can be really irritating for a user to browse and wait on a single page if it takes more than 10 seconds to load. It can increase the bounce rate for your website and your business could suffer a lot.

Any lightning fast website having less TTFB will certainly reduce the bounce rate. One must take care of certain checks for speed optimization to improve the user experience.

Some points for speed optimization to be checked are:

• HTTP/2 Version support
• DNS Prefetch
• DNS Preload
• Ajax Lazy Load
• Reducing HTTP requests
• Usage of Expires headers
• Minify CSS and .js files
• Reduce DNS Lookup

HTTP/2 Version Support

HTTP/2 is a major version of HTTP network protocol used by WWW (World wide web). It is developed by Google and was originally started from an earlier experimental version of SPDY protocol. It is made up of a session layer on top of the secure sockets layer (SSL).

HTTP/2 was developed by httpbis (bis stands for “second”), which was a working group of Internet Engineering Task Force. It is supported widely by most browsers today.

DNS Prefetch

A quick DNS resolving could perceive a significant amount of user engagement over the page. Prefetching helps in resolving a link before the user even click it. It is a great way to reduce the DNS request time and improve the page loading.

Suppose there are images or videos on sample.com, you have to add the directive the below directive in the head section of the HTML document. It will trigger DNS lookup even before the widget is requested.

<link rel=”dns-prefetch”>

DNS Preload

DNS Preload is a method which loads a particular resource in and stores it in the browser’ local cache. A site developer can instruct the browser to ‘preload’ a resource by adding below directive in the head section of the HTML document.

<link rel=”preload”>

Ajax Lazy Load

You might have seen lazy loading on several sites but might not have realized it. Several websites display the content like images or videos on demand. It means that the content you are viewing on the page will get downloaded on priority instead of loading the whole page.

Gone are the days when users have to wait for the whole site to load. Ajax lazy load implements the functionality of loading current content first only. It keeps downloading the rest until the whole page is downloaded. It not only applies to images and but for videos as well.

Your whole collection of products on the page can consume a lot of time over the internet. Because there could be a large number of images or videos for your products. You can use image lazy load to help the user with this.

Usage of Expires Headers

Every static content has an expiry time and proper usage of expires headers can speed up the performance of a page. The date/time you mention in Expires header removes the response from the cache. It tells the browser to show a saved version of a page from the browser cache and when that saved copy will expire.

You can define the expiry time for any content in the .htaccess file. It stores all the expires header data in it and you can find it at the root address of your website.

You can set “ExpiresDefault” directive to have a default expiry time for each content. If you do not set an expiry time for any content, the default value will work. A best practice before editing this file is to keep a backup of it first.

Reducing HTTP Requests

Every static element on the web page creates an HTTP request for the browser. It is necessary to remove unwanted requests from a page. For example, a “menu bar” on the checkout page could be a heavy request for the browser and you can remove it as there is no need of it on the page.

Only the relevant HTTP requests should be over the page to optimize its speed and performance. And you should remove all the unnecessary contents which are sending requests to slow down the speed and performance.

“CSS Sprite” is one such tool which helps in combining static contents like images, .js, and CSS. It reduces HTTP requests to the minimum and it is really helpful in optimizing the performance.

Minify CSS and .js files

While designing a webpage these two files play a really important role and we cannot ignore the importance of these files. Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) helps in formatting the content where the Javascript file is helpful for creating animations and hardcode themes.

But a lot of developers make the mistake to have plenty of lines for a single design pattern or functionality. You should always try to decrease the line of codes for your CSS and .js files. It boosts their loading time over the page.

You should always try to combine CSS and Javascript (.js) in one file. It is a best practice to have a single file for both instead of creating two different files. It is also a factor to optimize speed for your page.

Reduce DNS Lookup

Domain Name System (DNS) is a decentralized naming system. In simple words, you can say it provides a unique name and identity to each computer, service or system connected to the internet. DNS maintains a directory of domain names and translates them into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.

DNS lookup is a browser-based network tool which helps to find out the IP address of any particular URL. Keeping multiple copies of static contents like images, CSS and .js also helps in reducing DNS lookup. You should also check the size of Document Object Model (DOM) for your website.

Content Delivery Network (CDN) is one good option to reduce DNS lookup. You should move and host as many resources as possible on CDN. Some of the top CDN service providers in the market to help are Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, etc.

DOM Compression is one great technique to optimize the performance of your pages. You can apply two types of compression to your Document Object Model (DOM).

• Data Compression
• Image Compression

Data Compression

Without compression, multimedia data acquire a high storage capacity and seeks high bandwidth for transmission. Data Compression helps in minimizing the sizes and compressing data up to 70%.

The Gzip compression method is one such technique which is more popular and trending nowadays. You can try out the Gzip compression by editing the .htaccess file and use mod_gzip extension module to perform the compression.

The mod_gip is an external module which helps in compressing your web page contents serving over the HTTP protocol. It compresses the contents up to 70% but also uses more resources of your system. This can be compiled both as a static or dynamic module into Apache.

The mod_deflate is another compression module and helps in compressing output from your server before sending it to the client. It is done with the help of the Deflate output filter. The user is able to download the output really quicker due to the compressed sizes. It is based on the algorithm of lossless compression which is a combination of LZ77 and Huffman Coding.

Image Compression

Compressing images not only help in reducing the storage space but it also improvises the user experience. It is obvious that images with less size will load quicker than uncompressed images. Image compression algorithms can compress and reduce sizes of image up to 80%.

You can use two image compression algorithms for decreasing image sizes. Those are as follows:

Lossy Compression

Lossy compression decreases the size by applying a high compression degree. There is no scope for retrieving the original image after applying the lossy compression. It can decrease the size of an image up to 70%. But It can certainly degrade the quality of data or image during compression because it attempts to remove unnecessary information from the file.

Lossless Compression

As the name suggests, this algorithm allows compression without compromising any losses to the data. Lossless image compression does not compromise with the original quality of an image. It just reduces the size to optimal standard. It allows decompression of an image to retrieve the original image. There are several tools for it like PNG Crush, SmushIt, etc

When your e-commerce business will grow with time, so will the traffic of users will grow to your site. Assume a high traffic of users suddenly hit your website and suddenly your site server crashes or slows down.

How embarrassing would that be to a Customer who visited your site for the first time? Will they visit your site again?

A reliable hosting is really necessary to keep the business up and running. It boosts up the web performance and makes the site lightning fast. Webkul integrates all the features with your current hosting, e.g. AWS services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud services. We provide server setup and speed optimization services under the name of Cloudkul.

You can just follow the below steps for your HTML to Opencart conversion :

• You can generate a ticket along with your request for HTML to Opencart conversion and other information required or you can email us at support@webkul.com as well.
• Our support team promptly respond to the ticket and communicate with you to gather complete requirements.
• Our development team reviews the HTML pages.
• After that our support team provides a free proposal on the ticket.
• We will get approval on the quote.
• We will start the Opencart services after the payment.
• Responsive Opencart Integration.
• Testing, Deployment.

That’s all for this article still, have any issue or query, feel free to add a ticket or let us know your views at support@webkul.com

Also, please checkout our other useful Opencart extension.