Speed is something you can’t overlook when running a successful eCommerce store.
Nowadays, people have less attention span and can leave your store by opening a tab. You might think that you do not have high traffic, but it doesn’t matter because even if you have low traffic, the slow site performance of your website can make people leave your store before completing their purchase.
It can highly affect your Shopify speed optimization.
Here are the top tips to boost and speed up your Shopify store speed.
Evaluating Your Shopify Store’s Speed
Tools to measure Shopify site speed optimization
If you’re looking to improve the speed of your Shopify store, the first step is to identify its current performance. There are a few tools that can help you do this.
The first is the Google PageSpeed Insight tool. This tool gives you a score between 0 and 100, indicating how well your site performs on mobile. The higher the score, the better your site performs. It will improve your website and Shopify store pages.
Another tool called Pingdom also gives you a score and provides suggestions for improving your site’s speed. You can use this tool to identify which pages are taking too long to load and then make changes to those pages so they load faster.
Webpage test T measures how quickly web pages load from different locations around the globe. This is useful if you want to reduce latency by moving hosting services closer to your customers’ locations.
Chrome Dev Tools lets you see what content is taking up most of your page’s load time and find out which scripts are slowing things down—which will help you determine where optimization efforts should be focused. It will improve your website performance.
Analyzing and interpreting the data
The reason for Speeding up your Shopify stores is to analyze and interpret the data. You need a good view of what’s happening in your store.
First, you should look at the number of visitors on your site to get an idea of how many people are coming in and out of your store. You can use Google Analytics or another analytics platform to track your traffic.
Second, you should check out the average load time for each page. This will give you an idea of how long it takes for each page to load for customers. You can check this by using Google Pagespeed Insights or another speed testing tool like Pingdom or GTMetrix.
Thirdly, try running some A/B tests with different designs or features. This will help you see which ones work best so you can make changes accordingly!
Benchmarking your store’s speed against competitors
Once you’ve analyzed your website’s performance, you can benchmark it against competitors’ websites (and even your own). An excellent way to do this is by using Google Pagespeed Insights.
It allows you to compare two different URLs side-by-side and see how each site stacks up against one another regarding loading speed and bandwidth usage.
Key Factors Slowing Down Your Shopify Store
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Shopify themes and their impact on speed
The theme is the first thing you need to consider when improving the load speed of your Shopify store. A responsive theme with high-quality images and large files will slow your site’s load speed. Thus ultimately impacting the overall store speed. So, choose a theme carefully.
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Image optimization and compression
Adding high-quality Images is very important for all kinds of Shopify store owners, but they can also consume a lot of space on your website, affecting its loading time. Therefore, you should use an image compression tool to compress images and image files before uploading them to your site. Unoptimized images affect your overall website.
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Apps and their Impact on Site Speed
Your site speed will be directly affected by the apps you have installed. The more apps you have on your store, the higher the chance they will increase your site’s load time. You should evaluate whether or not those applications are worth keeping if they are slowing down your site. A good Shopify speed score improves Shopify store speed.
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Quality Shopify server and hosting
You must ensure that your Shopify server has enough resources to handle all the traffic from your store. If it does not, this could result in longer visitor loading times. Hosting also plays a vital role because if it is slow, it could also lead to slower loading times.
Practical Steps to Boost Shopify Speed
1. Performance Evaluation
Performance evaluation is the first step in Shopify speed optimization and getting your store speed up to par for desktop & mobile devices. T
his will help you identify any issues with the current setup of your store and improve your store performance as it has a user-friendly operating system.
It’s also an opportunity to get a baseline of your current performance to see how far you’ve come once you’ve completed all the optimizations in this guide.
Encourage customers to leave reviews after they’ve purchased so that you can engage with them and improve your website’s SEO ranking. You can also add social sharing buttons on product pages and encourage customers to share their purchases on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
2. Compressed your store images
Images are essential for your online store but can also drag your website’s performance. If you’re using Shopify, compress your store’s and product images as much as possible.
This can help reduce each image’s file size and make it easier for search engines to crawl and index them. You can use an app like Optimizilla to compress all your images simultaneously.
3. Minimize the use of third-party JavaScript & Shopify Apps
The more third-party apps you have installed on your site, the slower it will load. You want to keep your shop as minimal as possible so that it loads quickly and easily for customers.
You can do this by using a plugin called “Minify App” which will combine all of these scripts into one much smaller script size and weight. This will help speed up your site and make it easier for customers to navigate.
4. Use A Lightweight and simple Shopify theme
Lightweight themes are the best option for Shopify speed optimization. The theme load faster, and they don’t have many heavy features that will slow down your website. You can also find responsive themes that adapt to your device as they use Shopify theme inspector.
This means the theme will look great on any device and be easy to navigate. If you choose a theme with too many bells and whistles, it could take longer for your pages to load on mobile devices.
5. Select Proper Fonts
When you create your store, there is a lot of system font to choose from. However, choosing the right font can help your store load faster and improve customer experience.
So, what makes a good font? It must be clean, readable, and fast to load. If you’re looking for a font that is readable and fast, we recommend Open Sans or Roboto—these are both Google fonts optimized for speed.
6. Instead of a slider, add a Hero Image.
Sliders are an interesting idea, but they’re not exactly the most effective way to display your products. They take up much space and look like they’re trying to make you click on them.
Instead, try replacing your slider with a hero image focused on one particular product or category. This will let you show off more products at once without making it seem like you’re trying to push people into clicking through.
7. Change GIF images With Static Images
GIFs are great for grabbing attention with your product photos, but they can be a bit of a drag on your Shopify store’s speed. They’re made up of multiple images, which means they take longer to load and can cause your pages to load slowly. So if you want to boost your store’s speed, try replacing your GIFs with static images instead!
8. Reduce the HTTP Requests
The number of HTTP requests your website makes can be one of the biggest causes of slow page load times.
By reducing the number of requests that your website makes, you can significantly improve your load times. You can do this by using a CDN, minifying your CSS and JavaScript, and combining as many stylesheets as possible into one file.
9. Minimize Redirects and Broken Links
A redirect is a page that tells your browser to go to another page. A broken link is a link that points to a missing file. Both of these can slow down your Shopify store speed, so you should minimize both of them. How?
First, ensure you don’t have unnecessary redirects in place—you want to avoid unnecessarily redirecting users around your site. Second, make sure that all of your broken links are functional. Don’t let any broken links exist on your website!
10. Use Google Tag Manager for All Your Tracking Code
If you’re using Google Analytics, you’ll need to add the tracking code to all pages of your Shopify store. The problem is, if you do it manually, it’s a huge time-suck and a hassle—and if you forget one page, your analytics will be off.
Instead of doing that yourself and risking missing something, use Google Tag Manager instead. It’s an easy way to manage all your tracking codes in one place, automatically adding them whenever you create a new page or edit an old one.
11. Contact a Professional for Help
If you require additional technical assistance to optimize your Shopify store for maximum speed and usability, consider utilizing a trustworthy talent marketplace where you can find and hire expert Shopify developers.
Shopify developers stand out for their rigorous vetting, guaranteeing top-notch expertise. Many businesses choose Toptal for their eCommerce needs, confident in their ability to elevate online ventures to new heights.
If you’re looking to optimize your Shopify store or your eCommerce website, it’s worth hiring an expert. You can use the tips in this guide to get started, but it may take weeks or months to tweak everything. And that’s not including the time it takes to find out what works and what doesn’t! Contact experts today if you want to save time and get results faster.
Advanced Speed Optimization Techniques
12. Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to improve Shopify website speed optimization
If you want to optimize and improve Shopify store speed, then you need to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). What is a CDN? It’s a network of servers that host the files on your website. If someone visits your site from an area where the server isn’t located, it will automatically route them to a node closest to their location.
This helps improve load times by reducing the distance between the user and your site. You can use this CDN service with any other hosting provider as well.
13. Lazy loading and its effect on Shopify mobile speed optimization
Lazy loading is a technique that allows you to load your images only when they are visible to the user. Lazy loading helps you to improve your website’s speed by reducing the number of HTTP requests needed to render your page.
The main benefit of lazy load images is that it reduces the amount of data that needs to be loaded in the browser. The less data you load, the faster your page will load.
14. Mobile Accelerated Pages and its Impact on Shopify Store Speed Optimization
AMP pages are a great way to increase your Shopify app store speed optimization, and it will increase your overall customer experience. AMP pages are optimized for mobile devices and load very fast. This is because they use a stripped-down version of HTML that does not include any unnecessary coding, images, or Javascript.
You can create your own AMP page for your Shopify store page by installing the AMP plugin. You can also use the free hosted version or buy an enterprise license to edit it.
15. Taking advantage of browser caching
In your Shopify’s General Settings, you can enable browser caching for your site to help speed up your website. It is one of the best features of an online store. This means your site will load faster because it doesn’t have to download all of the data from the server each time a page is viewed.
Instead, it will just download static files and use them whenever someone visits your page. You can also configure how far back in time you want to cache content by adjusting the expiry date under Caching Configuration.
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Optimizing Key Pages for Enhanced Shopify Performance
In eCommerce, certain pages are paramount in guiding the user journey and ensuring conversions. For Shopify stores, three critical pages are the Product Detail Page (PDP), the Product Listing Page (PLP), and the Checkout page.
Let’s delve into the optimization strategies for each:
- Product Detail Page (PDP): The PDP is the spotlight for individual products. To ensure users get the best experience:
- Use high-quality, compressed images to showcase the product.
- Ensure the page is mobile-responsive, as many users shop via mobile devices.
- Limit heavy scripts or plugins that might slow down the page.
- Consider using tabs or accordions for extensive product details, ensuring faster initial load times.
- Product Listing Page (PLP): This is the browsing hub where users explore product ranges.
- Implement lazy loading, ensuring images load as users scroll, enhancing initial page load speed.
- Ensure filters and sorting options are optimized for swift responses.
- Use clear, compressed thumbnail images for products.
- Consider pagination to limit the number of products displayed simultaneously, ensuring quicker load times.
- Checkout Page: The final and most crucial step in the purchasing process.
- Optimize the checkout process to minimize cart abandonment by eliminating unnecessary steps or barriers.
- Ensure swift and secure payment gateway integrations.
- Display security badges prominently, assuring users of their data safety without compromising on speed.
- Keep the design minimalistic and focused, using compressed visuals where necessary.
Conclusion
Remember, it’s essential to be mindful of some key speed elements discussed above and the other areas of Shopify sites we haven’t covered.
Ultimately, optimizing for speed is more about considering all the different aspects surrounding a site; without balance and context, execution can do more harm than good. As with most things, a well-rounded approach will almost always yield the most outstanding results.
