When selling direct-to-consumer Farm food, convenience is key for your Buyers. If your Farm website is slow, sluggish, or unavailable, potential Buyers might abandon their carts before placing an order. A fast website provides a seamless shopping experience, ensuring Buyers can easily access your products and complete their purchases.
Recently, the Barn2Door team analyzed Farm websites and found ways to cut a site's load time by 84% by streamlining site plugins and investing in an enterprise content distribution network (CDN). This optimization keeps your Farm website looking good and improves the Buyer experience, while still reflecting your brand and values. Let’s dive into how eliminating hidden waste and speeding up your website load time will help your Farm get more sales.
Remove Unnecessary Elements
One of the biggest drags on website speed is loading unnecessary design elements. On many Farm websites, the default settings enable entire font libraries, meaning every font family loads a stylesheet whether your site uses it or not. The browser cannot draw anything until all of these stylesheets arrive. For example, one Farm loaded 196 font libraries when it used only one. Using a plugin to detect and block unused fonts can instantly speed up your site without altering your design.
Animations: Add-on packs often ship animation code to every page, even if the page doesn't use effects like image masking, text animation, or video backgrounds. Turning off unused extensions removes this hidden bloat, lightening the download weight for your Buyers.
Upgrade Your Layouts to Improve Buyer Experiences
Have you ever clicked on a website and watched the header collapse or snap into place? This is often caused by a speed setting called Critical CSS, which splits your stylesheet and loads header and footer styling late. This causes the page to draw the header unstyled, before snapping it back up to normal once the remaining styling arrives.
While standard speed tools might ignore this jump because it follows a click, your Buyers will definitely notice it. Turning off this setting eliminates the jump, reducing visible page movement by 71% and creating a smoother, more trustworthy experience for Buyers. Additionally, mapping your pages to the correct stylesheets prevents display errors where navigation menus drop onto a second line or appear unstyled.
Host and Cache Settings
Caching is the secret to a fast online Farm store. A cached page is served from memory in milliseconds, while an uncached one is rebuilt from scratch by the server. Two specific hosting settings can drastically reduce wasted server work:
Ignore Query Strings: When you send an email newsletter or run an ad, the links often carry tracking tags. Previously, these tags forced the server to treat the link as a brand new page and rebuild it from scratch. By configuring your cache to ignore tracking tags, those pages load instantly for Buyers clicking through from your marketing emails.
Turn Off Device Detection: Keeping separate cached copies of a page for mobile and desktop limits server efficiency. Since modern Farm websites are fully responsive, a single cached copy serves every device correctly, and turning the split off doubles the reach of each cached page. This results in 10.6 points higher cache effectiveness, giving you real headroom during busy harvest seasons or big email drops — exactly when slow pages cost you orders.
Best-In-Class Website Servers
All of the website servers for Barn2Door are hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) - the world’s largest, most reliable, and trusted cloud infrastructure. While AWS comes at a premium, it offers Farmers assurance that their business is hosted on the best-in-class server infrastructure available.
Enterprise-Grade Content Delivery Network & Security: To complement website hosting, Barn2Door has partnered with Cloudflare to provide web security, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection, and localized content delivery. More than 1/3 of the Fortune 500 companies leverage Cloudflare for their website presence. This enterprise-grade service provides Farmers with a protective shield and performance boost, speeding up website load times, while mitigating online threats.
Compress Images For Instant Loading
High-quality photos of your Farm and products are essential, but they shouldn't slow down your Buyers. By switching your image optimization from Lossless to Lossy compression, you can significantly reduce the amount of data downloaded. This matters most on phones, where a Buyer on a rural internet connection is paying for every image byte.
Prioritizing the fetching of your main "hero" image first ensures the most important visual element that a visitor sees loads immediately. You can also create a near-instant feel by quietly loading the next page in the background when a visitor hovers over a link, and fading smoothly between pages instead of flashing white.
Understand The Farmer View vs. The Buyer View
It is important to know that as a Farmer logged in as an editor, you bypass the website cache entirely. This means your own site will run far slower for you than it does for anyone else. This performance gap is why you might check your site, find it sluggish, and report a problem your Buyers don't actually have. By using a plugin that displays a live readout of both the Farmer's speed and the customer's speed in your admin bar, you can accurately understand your site's true performance.
Conclusion
Your Farm's website is the digital front door to your business. By stripping away wasted code, fixing layout jumps, investing in enterprise-grade server infrastructure, and optimizing your cache and images, your Farm website can provide a convenient shopping experience for your Buyers. A fast website reduces friction, ensuring that when a Buyer is ready to purchase your local products, nothing slows them down.
Barn2Door provides Independent Farmers with the software to make more money, ditch the office work, and look like a pro. If you’re curious to learn more, watch this 5-minute video.