Shopify speed optimization is one of the most crucial factors for Shopify store owners to consider. A slow-loading Shopify website will repel users and significantly reduce traffic, earnings potential, and credibility.
If your pages load quickly, it will provide a better user experience (UX) and improve your conversions. Overall, they help your website rank high in search engine results.
This article will discuss why you need to improve page loading speed and how to increase Shopify store speed in detail.
Why Does Speed Matter?
- Almost 70% of consumers say that the speed of a page affects their decision to buy from an online store.
- Conversion rates are most affected by how long a page takes to load in the first 5 seconds.
- With each extra second it takes a website to load (between seconds 0-5), conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42%.
- Most online shoppers will make a purchase after waiting no more than two seconds for a page to load.
These are some of the impacts website speed has on your visitors. Let’s find out some of the benefits of optimizing Shopify store loading speed.
Increase conversions and sales
Google reports that a one-second increase in site speed can increase conversions by as much as 27%. Therefore, site speed has a significant impact on your conversion and overall sales.
Decreases bounce rates
If the pages of your Shopify store load quickly, there will be less of a chance that a visitor will leave/bounce.
The image below illustrates how a few seconds can drastically alter the likelihood of a visitor bouncing off your Shopify store.
Builds customer loyalty
Skilled reports that 79% of consumers are less likely to make a repeat purchase from an online business if they are “dissatisfied” with the site’s speed. Hence, if your site is fast, you are more likely to obtain repeat customers.
Improves SEO ranking
Higher search engine rankings mean more exposure for your business and more potential customers. Google, the most widely used search engine, includes a website’s load time as a factor in determining its ranking in search results. The faster your site loads, the higher it will appear in Google’s search results, increasing your chances of being discovered by potential new customers.
How To Analyze Shopify Store Speed?
Before you can optimize your Shopify store to improve page load time, you first need to check the current performance status of your website.
PageSpeed Insights is Google’s own tool for gauging a website’s loading time. It performs an analysis of your website and provides metrics regarding how well it is performing, in addition to providing recommendations regarding how you can improve the speed of your website. Simply navigate to the tool and enter the URL of the page whose performance data you are interested in viewing in order to run a test.
In addition to that, there are other tools that can check your website’s performance. Some of the best ones are:
Existing Performance Features in Shopify?
One great thing about Shopify is that your store already has some speed optimizations built in.
Following are some of the performance features that should already be in place on your new Shopify site:
CDN
The Shopify platform uses the Fastly content delivery network. With the help of a CDN (Content Delivery Network), you can keep some of your site’s data on servers all over the globe.
This brings your users closer to the content on your website, decreasing the physical distance between them. Reducing the physical distance improves the performance of your website.
Leverage Browser Caching
By default, Shopify should be caching the internal resources of your website. Through the use of caching, you can have your users’ browsers temporarily store pieces of your content like images, JavaScript, and CSS. In other words, they won’t have to re-download the content if they plan on viewing the same resource more than once.
As a result, customers will be able to view some of your site’s content in a much shorter amount of time, which can boost your store’s performance.
How To Increase Shopify Store Speed
1. Compress Images
This is the first and foremost task you must perform to improve your Shopify store’s loading speed.
Images are invaluable for boosting a website’s aesthetic appeal. However, high-resolution images can be larger in size and can slow down your website significantly. Therefore, you need to compress the images.
Nonetheless, you still need to keep in mind the quality of the images. You can use tools like Tinypng to compress images, which will maintain the quality of the originals while reducing the size of the image files.
2. Choose A Lightning-Fast Responsive Theme
If you choose a fast Shopify theme, your website will immediately be in a great position in terms of performance. Some themes might have extra features that you don’t need right out of the box. This could slow down your site. A lighter theme, on the other hand, will put your website in a better position for future performance success.
You can check out the Shopify Turbo theme or our best list of Shopify themes for your store.
3. Optimize Videos
As technology has advanced, product videos have become an extremely effective marketing tool. 64% to 85% of consumers report being more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video.
However, hosting the product videos in your Shopify server would drastically slow down your website’s performance. You can upload and host the videos from third-party video hosting platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
4. Implement Amp
The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) open standard framework allows any store owner to make mobile-friendly web pages with minimal resource usage.
In a world where more than half of all purchases are made on mobile devices, it’s crucial that your site is optimized for mobile use and loads quickly. Therefore, if you use AMP (Mobile Accelerated Pages) technology, visitors to your site can quickly access it from mobile devices.
By using apps such as FireAMP or RocketAmp, you can quickly and easily create AMP pages for your Shopify store.
5. Reduce The Number Of Apps
Most apps you download from Shopify add JavaScript and CSS files to your store. The main problem is that even when you aren’t using the app, the JavaScript and CSS files are still running in the background, which slows down your site.
So, that’s why you should check your back panel for apps you’re not using and get rid of them.
6. Optimize App Settings
You can expand the functionality of your Shopify store with the help of a variety of third-party apps. But, try to keep these components/features to a minimum and only on required pages.
For instance, if a particular app offers floating trust badges on the store, you should use them exclusively on your product pages where they are actually needed.
7. Optimize Fonts
If you’re serious about optimizing Shopify’s load time, proper fonts are an absolute must. Shopify’s font library includes both system fonts and Google fonts, as well as licensed fonts from Monotype.
If you use fonts that aren’t on your customer’s computer, they’ll have to download them to see the text. If you want to save your customer the trouble of having to install new fonts on their computer, system fonts are an option to consider.
Most computers will already have some common fonts installed on their system, which is why it is called system fonts.
8. Lazy Load Images
This technique, known as “lazy loading,” delays the loading of images and other page assets until they are actually needed. As a result, customers will have the impression that your store is loading much sooner than it actually is. In most cases, all you need to do is download the appropriate app, and you’ll be good to go.
Search lazy loading app in the Shopify app marketplace.
9. Organize All Your Tracking Code With Google Tag Manager
Whether you do it yourself or have your developer do it, adding tracking codes for Google Analytics, AdWords conversions, goals, remarketing tags, etc., can slow down your site. Google Tag Manager consolidates all of your tags into a single location.
10. Minimize Redirects
Unnecessary redirected links can negatively impact web page load times and overall performance. Thus, it ultimately impacts the website’s overall load time. To implement 301 redirects on your Shopify store, make use of the in-built ‘URL redirect’ function.
11. Fix Broken Links
This message will definitely turn users away. You surely don’t want to annoy or disappoint your visitors with broken dead links. Free online tools like Dead Link checker can help you find broken links on your website so you can fix them or remove them and prevent unnecessary HTTP queries.
12. One Hero Image Instead Of Sliders
Using sliders, you can showcase several different images of a single product on your landing page. Visually, it’s appealing and gives customers a sense of what kinds of products you offer.
However, sliders can exponentially increase the page load time. Therefore, get rid of the slider and replace it with a single, captivating image and a direct call to action (CTAs).
A Shopify store can be quickly optimized with a few straightforward measures. To top it all off, you can boost your site’s speed without sacrificing any of the visual appeals that draw in visitors in the first place.
Keep in mind that the number of conversions you see will change for every tenth of a second you can speed up your site. That really adds up fast. Even minor enhancements can result in significant revenue gains.
Let us know if you have any comments or suggestions on the topic.