Shopify Speed Optimization
You must have come across the classic proverb, ‘Slow and steady wins the race.’ However, the world of eCommerce doesn’t really fit this expression. The adage “Time is money” is more appropriate in the online environment.
The amount of traffic that visits your website is directly impacted by how quickly it loads. Additionally, page speed affects the store’s conversions when it comes to eCommerce websites.
Convenience and time savings are the main justifications for why individuals choose internet purchasing over traditional retail. The purpose of internet buying, which is to save time, is ruthlessly murdered if a website takes an eternity to load. Let’s take an example to clarify it further.
Consider going to a store on foot to make a few purchases. When you visit the store and ask a salesperson to bring you the items you want, he walks slowly and returns each item after 10 minutes. The merchant opens the gates of his store slowly. Would you rather go to a store where you could get your goods immediately than stand about and waste time?
Online consumers experience a similar situation. 40% of visitors will leave your website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. Even some of your visitors might leave for another website, possibly one of your competitors. As a result, once you’ve been successful in drawing customers to your establishment, be careful not to make them depart due to your website’s poor loading time.
Your conversions and profitability may suffer if your website loads slowly. Therefore, all of your efforts to start a Shopify store and fill it with great products are for naught.
In this article, we offer some simple strategies for enhancing the speed of your Shopify website.
Continue reading to learn how to make your web pages quick and meet the demands of eager internet users.
Top 8 Simple Tips to Boost Shopify E-Commerce Store Speed
1. Change to A Single Excellent Hero Image
Sliders let retailers show a variety of product images on their home page. Visitors can see the various items the business currently has in stock and it has an appealing appearance.
However, did you know that sliders can significantly increase the website’s load time?
When a user hits the link to the homepage, the high-quality pictures and transitions take some time to load. Visitors will be greatly discouraged by the longer loading times and will be quick to hit their browsers’ return buttons as a result.
So, it’s time to say goodbye to your sliders. Check out the following stats, which will encourage you to remove the sliders from your homepage:
*Only 1% of website visitors click on sliders, hence they are pointless.
*They occasionally irritate users and reduce content visibility.
*Sliders and carousels do not function properly on mobile. Thus, worsening the user experience for mobile users.
* It’s absurd to think that sliders may harm your SEO.
So, are sliders something you still want to use on your homepage?
Remove the slider from your web pages and replace it with a single, high-quality hero image and a clear call-to-action for faster page loading (CTAs).
2. Reduce and Compress Images
Every eCommerce store depends on images to function. A store without pictures is like a store without goods in a retail setting.
Fortunately, there are no restrictions on posting images on the great Shopify platform. Additionally, it provides the following formats for picture uploads:
JPEG or a JPG
JPEG
PNG
GIF
Sellers must post multiple product photographs taken from various perspectives in order to enhance the store’s aesthetics and provide customers a better understanding of the products.
While this might improve how customers see the merchandise, each image adds to the website’s loading time. The practical solution to this issue is to reduce the size of the images in order to make them load more quickly because removing the images is not a feasible option for Shopify performance optimization.
There are numerous plugins that may be used to compress picture files and hasten the loading of your website. Don’t worry; the plugins won’t degrade the quality of your pictures. Except for their file sizes, your photographs won’t change.
The page will load much faster once all of your images have been optimized.
3. Pick A Quick Responsive Theme
The most important choice for a Shopify seller is choosing a theme. The theme serves as an online storefront. Prospects are enticed to explore the store and learn more about the company through eye-catching and inviting storefronts.
Therefore, pick a theme that complements the concept, tone, products, and prospective customers of your brand. Additionally, search for themes that load pages quickly. Your page speed will be impacted if you use themes with plenty of sliders, elaborate animations, complex navigation systems, etc. It will take longer for your website to load because each additional piece adds to the load.
We strongly advise testing the theme’s preview on Google Page Speed Insights before committing to it. It will show how quickly the page loads and offer pertinent recommendations to speed up loading and enhance user experience.
4. Lazy Load Pictures
Isn’t it annoying to visit a website where the photos take an eternity to load? And the aggravation grows when it takes an eternity for the product page’s pictures to load. The buyer loses interest in researching your store and ordering the items that drew his attention when the photographs take too long to load.
But don’t worry, visitors won’t leave your website because the pictures are taking too long to load. We appreciate sluggish loading!
A lot of pages make up the sizeable size of e-commerce websites. When someone clicks on a link to a website, their browser must launch and download all of the content included on the pages so that the user can view the website. As a result, visitors become impatient and irritated as the browser takes a while to load all the contents.
The demand and supply theory underlies lazy loading. Only the content that will appear above the fold, or what the visitor will see first, is loaded by the browser. Unless the visitor scrolls down, the stuff below the fold won’t be visible.
It speeds up page loading and makes the web page load instantly because the browser doesn’t have to load the complete website concurrently.
5. Integrate AMP Pages For Your Website
A common framework known as AMP, or Mobile Accelerated Pages, enables the vendor to construct web pages that load quickly on mobile devices.
In this fast-paced world, smartphones are no longer a luxury but rather a necessity. People no longer exclusively utilise their cell phones for communication. Apart from just communicating, people now take online classes, send money, explore websites, and even shop online.
Consider the numbers below to see how critical it is to enhance the mobile user experience:
*5.22 billion people use mobile devices worldwide.
*Mobile eCommerce sales are anticipated to climb by 22.3% from previous year to $3.56 trillion in the current year.
So, it’s imperative that marketers take mobile users’ visitors into account. Prepare to lose a substantial number of potential clients if your website loads slowly or performs poorly on mobile devices.
However, you can now optimize your web pages for mobile devices thanks to AMP. Users can go to your website more quickly and easily. To improve the user experience for mobile customers, there are many tools that can be found in the Shopify shop to assist you in creating AMP web pages.
6. Reduce the number of installed apps
Apps are incredibly useful, especially if you have no experience with developing. By installing the appropriate app, you can incorporate any functionality on your Shopify website. For instance, a live chat app can be downloaded by an eCommerce store rather than being created from scratch.
Therefore, if the speed of your website is decreasing, it’s time to review the installed programmes and remove those that are no longer required. You might discover a few applications that you installed to test their functionality but then neglected to remove. In a similar vein, if there are any apps that you no longer need, such as a slider app or a fancy loader programme, delete them to lighten the weight on the website.
Removing the app, you think takes longer to load is another great tip for improving page speed. Run your website without it and record how long it takes for the page to load. To check the change in loading times, locate a replacement for the removed app, install it, and then reload your page.
However, there is a drawback to adding these apps: even when not in use, they increase the load on your website. These apps have a large number of JS and CSS files that operate in the background and slow down your website.
To get rid of every app that slows down your web page, repeat the process with the other installed apps.
7. Repair faulty links
Every seller aims to give customers an exceptional experience. We think you share that desire. Reduce the number of broken links and redirects. Your website’s performance may suffer and the user experience may suffer if there are too many broken links and redirects. Additionally, it has an impact on your SEO, which hinders the ranking and visibility of websites on search engine result pages.
Do you want to know how to eliminate broken links and redirects quickly?
It’s easy, just fix them!
When redirecting
Redirects that aren’t necessary hinder website performance and slow page load times. It then has an impact on how quickly the full website loads. To implement 301 redirects on your website, use Shopify’s built-in URL redirect tool.
For broken links
This page is inaccessible due to a 404 error.
Users will be depressed by this message. Therefore, avoid being the brand that drives customers away by upsetting them. To stop generating pointless HTTP queries, use free online tools to find the broken links on your website and then fix or eliminate them.
Broken links are also detrimental to SEO. The bounce rate of a website increases when a user clicks the back button on a page that doesn’t exist.
The final recommendation is to use Google Page Speed Insight to evaluate your website’s pages and find the parts that are slowing down loading times. Then, take the advice given to speed up loading times and enhance website performance.
The following are some of the crucial components for desktop and mobile webpages that Google Page Speed Insights has identified:
*Minify JavaScript and CSS
*Image optimization
*Remove CSS and JS that render-blocks from above-the-fold web page content.
*Speed up server responses
*Utilize browser caching
*Landing page redirection should be eliminated.
*Compress
The parts that add load to your website and cause it to load slowly can be found by analyzing your website’s performance on Google PageSpeed.
Final Verdict
For the website to receive a lot of traffic, it must load quickly. Speed and page loading time are crucial for the success and expansion of enterprises in the case of eCommerce retailers.
People will browse a website and find out more about the brand if it loads quickly and presents all of its material to visitors. If the website offers a seamless experience, potential customers can also be converted into clients with ease.
We hope the advice in the aforementioned list will assist you in reducing the load on your web pages and speeding up the Shopify website.
