Are you fed up because your customers leave your Shopify website without ordering anything? The main reason behind this is your site’s sluggish performance. We understand your pain, and that’s why we are here to help you.
Consider this example: A customer visits your Shopify store and browses for the products; however, your site takes ages to load instead of getting speedy performance. It will not only make the customer frustrated but also forces them to leave your site. Therefore, it’s your site to focus on optimizing the speed of your Shopify site.
In this guide, we will explore some of the best tips for Shopify speed optimization. These tips will turn your slow-loading site into a high-end powerhouse, increase conversions and thrive in the industry.
But before we dwell on that, we will understand the importance of a speedy website and the common factors that affect Shopify site speed.
Without waiting much, let’s get the ball rolling.
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Speed is an important point not just for the proper functioning of your Shopify store; it directly impacts the user experience and conversion rates. A slow-loading website draws away visitors from the site, resulting in a high bounce rate.
Conversely, a high-speed website increases conversation, helps you build customer loyalty, and improves your site’s Google Search Rankings.
Moreover, a high-speed website helps you satisfy your potential audience’s needs, thereby increasing sales and conversion rates.
A range of factors affect the speed of your Shopify site. Out of which some factors are under your control, and some are not. Let’s look at them.
Here is the list of factors that are not under your control.
Your customers would be spread worldwide. They would use different devices and the internet according to their budget and requirements. Hence, it directly affects the slow or fast loading of your Shopify site.
You can always notify them to leverage the latest browser version and clear the cache for a smooth Shopify store experience. You can even alert them to check their internet connection in case of slow site loading.
Several elements of your Shopify store get saved on the local browsers of the customers. Hence, all the resources are fetched and loaded from the machine of the consumers only.
The Shopify store is even saved on the server side. Hence, the Shopify store gets loaded instantly if the customer has visited it previously.
Here is the list of Shopify store factors that you can directly control. Soon, we will look at some of the tips & strategies to improve your Shopify site speed.
There are a wide number of apps that you leverage to improve the appearance and performance of your Shopify store. Here, removing all the unusual apps will improve your site speed.
In addition to this, utilizing lightweight themes for your site increases its speed.
High-size images & videos are another reason behind the slow Shopify website. If your site takes too long to load media, users think it is slow and leave it immediately.
Let us optimize your Shopify site for speed and improve your store’s performance.
Optimize NowShopify has built-in fonts that you can integrate into your site. However, if you integrate a font not installed on your customer’s devices, they will have to download it first to read the text on your site. This directly reduces the speed of your Shopify site.
A liquid code generally renders dynamic content and changes how to present elements on your Shopify site. When this code is not optimized well, it reduces the site’s speed and performance. This type of code has many nested loops, repetitive code blocks, and complex conditionals.
Here are some of the most effective things you can do for Shopify Speed Optimization.
Selecting the right Shopify theme is an essential decision. Here, you should go for a speedy and responsive theme. You should also ensure that the theme is up-to-date. In addition, it is crucial to choose a theme that aligns well with your brand. You should easily customize the Shopify theme.
To check the theme’s performance and what improvements you can make, run the latest version of the theme in Google Pagespeed Insights.
Apart from this, you should turn off all the unnecessary features in your theme that don’t add any value to your audience’s life.
Choosing the right font can improve the performance of your Shopify site. In general, the Shopify font library offers a range of fonts to choose from. These include system fonts, Google fonts, licensed fonts, and more.
The primary rule is to go for a system font for your site. Why? A system font is something already present on the customer’s computer. It removes the hurdle of customers downloading the font when they access your Shopify site.
Some of the most well-known system fonts are Mono, Serif, and Sans-serif. Below is the list of fonts available in this category.
Mono: This category has fonts such as Menlo, Consolas, Monaco, Liberation Mono, or Lucida Console.
Serif: This category possesses fonts such as Apple Garamond, Times New Roman, Source Serif Pro, Droid Serif, Iowan Old Style, Baskerville, and Times.
Sans-serif: This category comprises fonts such as Ubuntu, Helvetica Neue, Segoe UI, BlinkMacSystemFont, and Roboto.
A massive amount of unoptimized images and videos on your site can hinder its performance and slow it down. Here are some of the things you can do for Shopify speed optimization.
Shopify stores accept different formats of images like JPG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Compressing all the images in these file formats can speed up your Shopify site. Here, you need to ensure that images are of suitable size and only include a small amount of images on a single page.
To compress new images, we suggest you visit websites like tinypng.com or tinyjpg.com to reduce the size of your images. After compressing the images, upload them on your site.
If you want to optimize the images already present on your Shopify store, you can leverage the plugins like Crush.pics and Image Optimizer.
You should remove all the excessive images present on your Shopify store. It will ultimately reduce the HTTP requests on the site. Look out for empty image sources inside the code and delete them.
Contact our Shopify experts and get a professional optimization support.
Contact Us NowAn eCommerce site is loaded with a lot of images on every page. Here, the images are loaded whenever a customer clicks on a particular product link. Hence, it takes a lot of loading time.
The best and the most effective way to resolve this issue is to lazy load images. The browser will load all the content in the viewer’s area by implementing this. In simple words, the browser loads the images above the fold.
To enhance the speed of your Shopify site, the next and most important thing you should focus on is replacing GIFs with static pictures. You might have a question about how GIFs reduce the site speed.
The main reason is that GIFs are huge and consist of multiple frames. In general, a simple 2 sec GIF is equal to 20 images. These GIFs increase the weight of your site. Therefore, it is recommended to replace GIFs with static images.
With each passing year, the usage of smartphones is increasing at a never-before rate. People use mobile phones to shop for small or big things in their life.
According to the latest report by Insider Intelligence, Mcommerce sales reached $415.93 billion in 2022. It clearly states that you need to focus on improving the speed of your Shopify site for mobile device users. And how can you achieve this? By implementing AMP.
AMP is referred to as Accelerated Mobile Pages. It is an open standard framework that enables you to build mobile-friendly web pages that load quickly.
There is not any built-in solution to implement AMP natively in Shopify. You can go for popular apps like FireAMP or RocketAMP.
Collecting user data is essential to understand the users’ needs; however, it slows down your Shopify site. How?
To measure different metrics like conversions, goals, retargeting, etc., you will need to integrate different tracking tags on a page. All these tags increase the requests and ultimately reduce the site’s speed. Then, what’s the solution?
Simple, opt for Google Tag Manager. It is a tool that helps you to merge all the tracking tags into one JavaScript request. It asynchronously loads all these things.
Sliders & Carousels are most effective for displaying images and attracting visitors. However, these sliders & carousels increase the weight of your site and reduce its speed. How to cope with this?
Another best solution for Shopify speed optimization is to leverage the hero image instead of the sliders & carousels. A hero image is a big image placed on the homepage with relevant text to draw visitors’ attention.
The general rule of thumb here is to keep a hero image (high-quality with small size) along with a call-to-action that passes a clear message about your brand and encourages visitors to take action.
By default, Shopify offers a wide variety of apps you can leverage to enhance functionality, get more user engagement, and improve sales & conversions. You can also build and use a custom Shopify app. Here’s the guide on Shopify app development costs if you are considering building a custom app.
Please note that whenever you install any Shopify apps, it adds many JS and CSS files that run in the backend and affect your Shopify site speed.
To ensure that your site runs optimally, conducting regular assessments of all apps is essential. Further, follow the simple steps given below.
WebDesk Solution can help you with app optimization and fine-tune your Shopify site for speed.
Contact Us NowThe next most important thing for Shopify speed optimization is minimizing the broken links and redirects on your site.
The higher the number of redirects to your site, the higher the HTTP requests, ultimately increasing the site speed. The best way to enhance the site speed is to remove all the excessive redirects.
Another thing to look after is to avoid any redirect loops, including redirecting pages to other redirect pages.
Similar to the redirects, there are also broken links which also generate various HTTP requests. To avoid this, leverage an SEO audit tool to detet broken links on your site and fix or update them as soon as possible. You can take help from a digital marketing company for this.
The speed score of your website also helps you to make necessary changes. But what is it? The speed score of your Shopify site is calculated based on how it performs in the Google Lighthouse Text environment. If it is above 50, it is considered good. Above 70, it is considered great.
The best way to test the speed score of your site is to leverage Google PageSpeed Insights. The tool gives you metrics on how well your site is performing and what you should focus on to improve its speed. Here is the screenshot of how it looks.
We hope you have understood everything related to Shopify Speed Optimization. By implementing the tactics we have shared above, you can improve the speed of your Shopify site. It ultimately increases your site’s performance, offers consumers a great experience, gets more conversions, and increases sales.
If you still need help with speed or anything else on your Shopify store, feel free to reach out to us.
WebDesk Solution is a leading Shopify development company. We can understand all the issues you are facing in your Shopify store and provide you with the most relevant solution.
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