Boosting Your Shopify Store’s Speed: Proven Methods For Optimal Performance

As a Shopify store owner, you are aware of how speed of website is important for the success of your online business. Confusion among customers reduced conversion rates, and eventually lower sales might result from a slow Shopify store speed. Because of this, store speed optimization is crucial.

This tutorial will walk you through every step of optimizing your Shopify store speed. We’ll talk about the value of site speed, typical reasons for pages to load slowly, and ways to make Shopify stores load faster. We’ll go through all the best practices and resources you need to speed up your Shopify store, from image optimization to app management. So let’s go to work making your website load lightning-quick!

What is the speed af a Shopify store?

The loading and displaying times of a Shopify store’s contents are referred to as the store’s speed. This is crucial for both search engine optimization and user experience.

While a fast-loading store can offer a smooth experience that encourages customers to stay and explore, a slow-loading store may cause user irritation and cause them to leave before making a purchase. Additionally, page speed is taken into account when ranking websites by search engines like Google, so quicker retailers are typically more likely to show up higher in search results.

It is advised to optimize pictures, employ caching strategies, and use as few extra scripts or plugins as possible to ensure the fastest possible storage speed. Additionally, Shopify provides several information and tools to assist retailers in enhancing the performance and speed of their stores.

You should investigate the Shopify store statistics:

• A 0-4 second load time is recommended for higher conversion rates.
• For loading times between 0 and 5 seconds, conversion rates can decrease by about 4.42% with each additional second.
• The first 5 seconds of a page’s load time have the highest impact on conversion rates.
• Conversion rates can decrease by about 2.11% for loading times between 0 and 9 seconds for each extra second.

Why is it vital to optimise the speed of online stores?

1. Impact SEO

Your SEO rankings may be significantly impacted by the speed of your Shopify store. Because it influences user experience, search engines like Google utilize page loading speed as a ranking factor.

Additionally, you are losing a lot of visitors if your store is not ranking. And everyone is aware that traffic is the key to earning money! Therefore, speed-optimizing your website is essential if you want to maintain your store profitably.

2. Negative user experience

The user experience of a Shopify store can be significantly impacted by its speed. Users want websites to load quickly and seamlessly in the fast-paced world of today. A Shopify business may lose sales and potential clients if users get impatient and leave the page before it loads completely.

According to studies, even a one-second delay in the time it takes for a page to load can lower conversion rates by 7%.

3. Mobile user experience of your store may be compromised

Nowadays, the majority of internet traffic comes from mobile devices. This holds true for eCommerce websites in particular. Risk of losing clients before they even have a chance to check out your store’s inventory if your website loads poorly on mobile devices.

4. Gives you an edge over competitors

Businesses need fast websites. But many individuals are unaware that a competitive edge can be gained from a website’s speed.

Why? Let’s imagine your rival has a website that loads slowly whereas yours does not. Visitors will be more likely to choose your store over theirs as a result. They’ll spend more time on your website, think they’re getting better service, and are more likely to buy something.

Additionally, having a quick website can help Google rank you higher in search results, which will bring in more visitors and potential clients who aren’t even checking out your rivals’ websites!

5. Customer loyalty and the reputation of your brand are at risk

You’ve spent time, money, and resources developing your brand. You’ve developed a brand that your clients adore, and you take pride in what you’ve accomplished. But what if sluggish load times might undo all that?

Although no one likes waiting for a website to load, what if you have a customer trying to place an order on their phone or who has been impatiently waiting for two minutes for a page to load?

What if people abandon your site because it takes so long to load? That won’t help your brand’s reputation at all, and even worse, it won’t inspire consumers to trust you and your company enough to make another purchase.

Do you realize that:

• 79% of online buyers who had a negative buying experience are less inclined to make another purchase from the same Shopify store, and 64% would simply shop at another website.
• If the page loads slowly, 18% of customers will abandon their shopping carts.
• According to 46% of online shoppers, speed is the primary factor influencing their decision to visit a store again.

6. Conversions may suffer greatly.

One of the most crucial elements in deciding your conversion rate for your Shopify business is its speed. It determines whether a consumer is satisfied or frustrated, and it may make or ruin your company.

A customer is more likely to stay on your site if it loads quickly. The more time they spend on your website, the higher the likelihood that they will convert.

7. Decrease server traffic

Fast-loading Shopify businesses not only garner better ratings and more conversions, but they can also help you save money.

This is because a slow-loading website raises the risk of expensive failures or downtimes by overloading the server. You are losing money and not making any when your store is closed.

The good news is that website speed optimization can assist lighten the load on your servers and ensure that your site remains quick and responsive even when many users are using it simultaneously.

How to perform Shopify speed optimization?

1. Pick a theme that’s quick and responsive

The templates that control how your site appears and functions are called themes. They might be swift or sluggish, light or heavy. Your site will load more quickly if you choose a theme that is speedy and responsive.

A decent theme like Hongo Shopify theme will load quickly on mobile devices because it was designed with speed in mind. Just keep in mind that if you’re not careful, it’s simple to end up with a theme that loads slowly, which will turn off visitors and decrease your sales.

Do you need assistance selecting the ideal theme for your Shopify store? Contact us now!

2. Image compression and optimization

Visual components are a significant part of your business when selling online. If not employed wisely, these components could quickly work against you. One of the first things you should do if your business is slow is to optimize your photos.

Images can significantly slow down your store’s performance, therefore it’s crucial to both compress and display-optimize them. This entails ensuring that the image is displayed on your website as effectively as feasible for both user experience and search engine optimization.

By deleting extraneous data from the image file, such as metadata or other useless pieces of information, you can easily compress images to make them smaller in size. The file size of an image will decrease in direct proportion to the amount of extraneous information you remove.

In order to optimize an image, a variety of formats must be used, depending on the type of image. For instance, if you use an image that contains text, make sure that the image is presented in HTML so that browsers can read the text rather than displaying the image (which would be sluggish).

Here are some recommendations for image optimization to increase the speed of your Shopify store on average:

• Learn about several file formats, such as JPG, PNG, and JPEG.
• Always optimize image file sizes.
• Name your image files with appropriate keywords for better SEO.
• Add alt tags to images.
• Use a sitemap, to get your images seen by Google.

3. Slow image loading

To improve the speed of your Shopify business, start by reducing the size of your images. The majority of the time, nevertheless, file size reduction alone is insufficient. Lazy loading comes into play here.

Your website’s page load speed may be slowed down if it has a lot of images. Make sure to only load the images that can be seen by the user’s browser to avoid this issue. This is known as lazy loading, and it’s a terrific approach to increase your store’s quickness.

4. Examine the effectiveness of webpages (using Google PageSpeed)

To check how well your site performs in terms of speed and load time, utilize Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. You won’t have to hazard a guess as to what might be holding down your Shopify site because the tool will also offer suggestions for how to make it faster.

5. Make use of AMP

You must use AMP if you want to guarantee that clients can locate your Shopify store when they search for it. Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, is a technique for using HTML code that makes your website load quicker on mobile devices. It’s crucial in light of the fact that most people shop online using their phones rather than laptops or desktop computers.

Additionally, the AMP format enables the development of websites that load quickly on sluggish connections. Your clients will appreciate not having to wait as long for their pages to load as a result of this.

6. Repair faulty links

Store speed is at the mercy of broken links. They can harm your store’s SEO in addition to aggravating customers and detracting from the User Experience (UX) of your website. Google is likely to believe that if a link on your website is broken or out-of-date, then the content you are pointing to must also be obsolete.

7. Reduce your use of applications

Even though you might be tempted to pack your store with as many apps as you can, you can actually succeed in business without them. If you’re just utilizing them to take up room, they’re probably doing more harm than good.

Today, there are a tonne of Shopify applications available that promise to help with anything from SEO guidance to inventory management, but they all slow down a website. Start by removing or deactivating any apps that don’t offer much value to your Shopify store if you want to make it speedier.

Therefore, the general rule of thumb is to not install an app if you aren’t utilizing it. However, if you must use an app and can’t operate your store without it, make sure the program is small and doesn’t consume a lot of bandwidth.

8. Minimise redirects

Redirects are essentially when a user clicks on anything and their browser moves them to a different page or website without their knowledge. The issue is that redirection makes it take longer for the browser to load and navigate between sites, which slows down your website.

If it takes too long for your customers to find what they’re looking for, this could lead to lost sales. Make sure your Shopify store has the least number of redirects feasible to avoid this issue.

Here are some suggestions to lessen redirection for faster shop loading:

• Reduce the number of redirect chains used.
• To notify search engines that a page has been moved permanently, use a 301 redirect.
• Use relative URLs, which are shorter and quicker to resolve, use canonical tags to tell search engines which version of a page is preferred, and update internal links often.
• This redirect is the most search engine-friendly and assures the transfer of link equity from the previous page.

9. Seek professional assistance

If you’ve been following along, you already know how much work it takes to speed up your Shopify store. The aforementioned points, however, represent only the very beginning. The process of improving the speed of a Shopify store involves so much more. This covers things like

• Reducing server response times
• Compressing HTML and CSS
• Using a Content Delivery Network
• Removing render-blocking CSS and JS from above-the-fold webpage content, enabling browser caching, etc.

10. Utilise Hero images

A large banner image at the top of a page is referred to as a hero image in web design. Since customers adore high-quality images, its major goals are to grab users’ attention, educate them about your product, offerings, or company, and foster a positive reputation.

As you might expect, a hero picture is a terrific way for an eCommerce website to rapidly notify visitors about the products the business sells and the atmosphere of the site as a whole. One image may not, in the opinion of some, contain all the information they have to convey. This is why business owners frequently opt to utilize a carousel – a collection of many revolving images – on top of their websites.

However, your store will load more slowly the more images you utilize. Consequently, if you desire speedier performance, you could choose to swap out the carousel for a hero image.

11. Preload web fonts

Preload is a mandatory instruction for the browser, so make sure you only preload fonts that you’re actually using on your site. Otherwise, you might end up with wasted requests and extra page size. Don’t use too many fonts, as these will slow down your site (especially on mobile devices with slow internet connections). Consider using 2 – 4 fonts at most. Make sure that your fonts match your CSS if you’re using a font CDN like Google Fonts. Always specify the crossorigin attribute to avoid double-fetching font files.

12. Replace GIFs with static images

The simplest method to enhance your website’s performance is by opting for PNG format for your images over GIF format. Although both formats are quite similar when it comes to displaying uncomplicated graphics, PNG files have the upper hand as they can be compressed to a size that’s typically 5% to 25% smaller than an equivalent GIF file.

By replacing GIFs with optimized static images, you can significantly improve the loading times of your website and provide a smoother user experience, especially for visitors with slower internet connections or mobile devices.

EndNote

We hope this post has given you a better understanding of how to optimize Shopify’s speed. We’ve selected effective strategies for achieving high-speed performance that you may use and implement.

Shopify stores concentrate on enhancing and simplifying the client shopping experience. If functions not work correctly, then surly its reduced the website’s speed.

However, there is nothing wrong with getting expert assistance if you feel like your brain is spinning (and we don’t blame you for that).

LinkSture – Shopify development service is available to assist if you are currently using Shopify or another eCommerce platform and may experience speed concerns. Our team will work with you to successfully complete Shopify speed optimization! Please get in touch with us; we’re always here to help you.