There are lots of factors that can influence your Shopify website speed. Below we are going to break them down and see how you can improve your site speed in order to get more satisfied users and potential clients.
The Factors that Slow Down Your Shopify Site
Using Apps
In case you choose to add apps to your Shopify website, you should keep in mind that they add code to the website’s theme in order to run. Some code can slow down your site, so if you’ve stopped using some app, it’s better to remove it from your site.
Applying Themes
Themes are commonly made of Liquid, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. When you decide to edit or customize your theme, you can accidentally increase the files size.
App or Theme Features
Some features of themes’ or apps’ you’re using might slow down your website as well. It can be popups or preloads. So try to avoid loading extra data your customers won’t use.
Images and Videos
Oversized videos and images can affect your website’s speed badly, causing lots of troubles, especially when they’re hidden. And users wait for some huge images to load, they might consider your whole website to be slow.
Best Practices to Speed up Shopify Site
In this guide we will provide you with the list of the best instruments you can put to use to scan your Shopify site, accompanied by some useful notes on how you can enhance your site’s mobile performance. There will also be research information which is there to highlight the influence of loading speed in respect to your site’s rankings and revenue. These tools and experiments are really easy to use and implement on any Shopify website.
Google Speed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a tool provided by Google that is intended for testing and boosting a website performance, regardless of device used. Through the agency of this tool, you’ll get to know all the website’s performance scores. It is also important to mention that Google PageSpeed score is applied with the predefined settings, such as device and connectivity. In that matter, this rate doesn’t reflect the real user experience to the full.
PageSpeed Insights also demonstrates actual data that can be viewed in the Field data section of the Chrome User Experience Report. This hinges upon the Google Chrome combined information that the browser gets from the users. Such section is really beneficial as it reflects real user experience
How to Speed Up Site On Mobile
And here are some advice you might want to consider if you need to boost the overall mobile performance of your Shopify website:
Checking out the speed of your mobile website.
You can use well-known services like Test My Site, let us say, that inspects your site's mobile performance and provides you with personalized tips for enhancing it.
Lowering your website pages’ weight.
Many ecommerce websites are really not that easy to load on mobile devices. Nowing that the loading speed plays an important role for mobile users, you shouldn’t make them wait more than several seconds to access your site. So try to focus on creating pages that weigh less than 1 MB. Add cloud-based UI elements, like Google Reviews Shopify app.
Weeding out picture carousels.
In case you’ve got them on your site, keep in mind that your Shopify website audience will only pay attention to the first picture of a carousel and will go on with scrolling your site further. So if there’s a need to lower the page’s weight right now, the first thing to get rid of is auto carousels on the mobile site.
Improving search on your site.
Prompt your Shopify website audience to initiate their exploration with starting a search session on your site! Set the search box in the top of your mobile site to accentuate it. And consider embedding typos autocorrect to make the mobile search more user-friendly.
Strengthen the efficiency of the checkout.
It’s essential for ecommerce companies to make the checkout process on their sites as smooth as possible, which also means fast. That’s why it’s important to make your site recognize the returning customers and their previous purchase information. Consider adding online payment services like PayPal or Google Pay, to allow your users make a buy in a few clicks or taps.
How Big of Impact Site Speed Has on SEO
Back in 2010, Google announced that site speed is going to become a ranking signal. As the years passed, the overall website performance has become more and more important, and loading speed boosting is now among the major parts in SEO strategies. It’s obvious that a slow site causes a negative effect on user experience and visitors don’t want to land on sites that load too slow. As a result, users won’t come to such websites in search of an answer to their questions. Here’s why you shouldn’t ignore the aspect of speed while developing your website.
And still it’s not easy to evaluate exactly to what degree it affects SEO as Google has always been silent about its algorithms' details. We can only be certain that your Shopify website usability and overall user experience means a lot, especially on mobiles. Google also revealed that 53% of mobile sites are abandoned by the users if it takes more than 3 seconds for them to load.
How Site Speed Affects Conversion
In the event that your website faces any loading problems, you have a significant chance of losing potential sales. The online audience most likely won’t buy again from the store that loads slowly. And for such a store it’s a great loss of returning visitors. And as ecommerce businesses rely a lot on returning visitors, as they form a crucial element of the Customer Lifetime, leading up to 48% of all transactions according to Business Insider data, this might be a point to consider for you.
So, piling into your site’s loading speed enhancements, you are investing in your business’ prosperous future. Regardless of your revenues, your Shopify site can bring you more no matter what you’re up to - a blog, a company website, or ecommerce store. By putting to use the Best Practices we’ve described above for boosting and maintaining efficiency, you can uplevel your company faster and with absolutely no effort.
