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Site speed is one of the most crucial elements of any successful e-сommerce store. However, optimizing your Shopify store can get challenging without the proper techniques. Given that the probability of website bounce increases by 32% as page loading times go from 1 to 3 seconds, knowing how to master Shopify speed optimization is crucial.
Your website’s speed and performance have a significant impact on whether users become customers – but how can you improve Shopify site speed effectively? This article will outline the top practices for improving your website’s speed and optimizing your Shopify store for the best performance results. Let’s get started!
Determining Your Shopify Store Speed
Before improving your website’s speed, it’s important to determine your current Shopify store speed and whether you have a good Shopify speed score. This is possible by viewing your Shopify online store speed report. This report provides an overview of how fast your website loads for visitors to help you identify whether you need to focus on improving and optimizing your site’s content.
A higher speed score is granted to online stores that are fast for various customers attempting to access it, even for users with a poor connection. Lower scores represent online stores inaccessible to the complete range of customers who want to purchase from your store. This report will explain whether your website is faster, slower, or the same speed as similar e-сommerce stores.
How to Master Shopify Page Speed Optimization
Simply put, knowing how to increase Shopify store speed is crucial. It can prevent high bounce rates, attract more people to your website, and drive users to convert into customers. But what are the specific ways you can master Shopify page speed optimization? Let’s look at a few.
1. Use Accelerated Mobile Pages
Using accelerated mobile pages (AMP) is one option to improve how your website performs on mobile devices, something increasingly important as more and more shoppers use mobile devices to buy things online. In 2023, 79% of smartphone users have used a mobile device to make online purchases and mobile commerce is expected to comprise 44% of all e-commerce purchases in 2024.
AMPs are frameworks allowing e-сommerce site publishers to create speed-optimized pages for mobile devices. These applications work by converting pages of your Shopify store to AMP and indexing specific pages with Google to promote faster loading times. They’re ideal for improving usability on mobile devices – however, keep in mind that these apps can’t be implemented natively in Shopify. Popular apps you can consider include FireAMP and RocketAmp.
2. Compress Your Images
Images are essential to marketing and selling your products – however, if they aren’t compressed, it becomes increasingly difficult to speed up Shopify site loading times. While high-resolution images are valuable, their files are typically large, and this size can significantly slow down page loading times.
Tools like tinypng.com and tinyjpg.com can help you reduce the size of your images while maintaining their quality, providing you with smaller image files that allow your website to load faster so you can meet customer expectations. You can also use Shopify apps like Crush Speed and Image Optimizer to automatically compress your images.
3. Choose Themes Wisely
Your website theme should be appealing and effective in creating a positive user experience. However, certain themes can cause pages to load slower, and if you aren’t careful with your selection, you might sacrifice customers for a nice-looking theme.
Before choosing and installing a theme for your website, ensure its code is lightweight and doesn’t have unnecessary baggage that will cause pages to load slower. Seek themes that are responsive and capable of loading quickly – simplicity is often best for themes compared to flashy and decorative options.
Additionally, no matter what theme you choose, make sure that it’s always up-to-date. Updates will help optimize your website and ensure your theme works properly without causing slow loading times. Test your theme’s speed using Shopify’s live preview option before deciding.
4. Lazy Load Images
Images play a crucial role in loading times, and another option to improve how fast your website loads is lazy loading your images. Lazy loading prevents all of your site’s content from loading at once when users visit your website, meaning that users will only see certain content when they reach specific points.
Too many images below the fold will inevitably cause slow loading times, putting you at risk for high bounce rates. With lazy loading, content above the fold appears to the user, while supporting content is only available when the user scrolls beneath immediately accessible content. By preventing your site from instantly downloading every image on the page, you encourage faster loading times.
One way to implement lazy loading is to keep low-quality images below the fold. As the user scrolls to the image, it’s replaced with a high-quality version, ensuring that customers see your products in their best form. You can learn more about lazy loading on Shopify here.
5. Lower Your Use of Third-Party Apps
While adding apps to your Shopify site can help improve it in many aspects, too many third-party apps can cause significantly slower loading times, defeating the purpose of using these applications to improve your website. Every app or script added to your website increases the number of requests your site makes when it loads, resulting in slow loading times and customer frustration.
Remember that most apps downloaded for your Shopify store will add CSS files/JavaScript to your site. Go through your current apps, determine which ones are ineffective or hardly used, and remove them. This action will help your Shopify site load much faster!
6. Fix Broken Links and Redirects
No consumer wants to shop online only to find that your website has broken links and redirects. This problem not only makes the customer experience more difficult – it also makes your pages load slower, causing additional frustration for people trying to shop your products.
Fixing broken links and redirects is an essential part of making sure your website is optimized, and luckily, it’s pretty easy to fix this issue. Once you find store pages that lead to redirects or broken links, you can remove the links and replace them with functioning live pages. There are several apps available to detect broken links and save you time from searching through your site!
7. Replace Your GIFs With Static Images
While we love GIFs, they aren’t the best option for Shopify stores and can significantly slow page loading times. If your website uses GIFs to showcase various products, it’s time to switch to static images to improve the user experience.
Replacing GIFs with static PNG or JPG images will help you achieve faster loading times, bringing about customer satisfaction like never before. Customers might value the interactivity that GIFs provide, but most often, they value fast loading times more. If you don’t want to replace your GIFs with static image files, you can consider compressing them using lossy compression or converting your GIFs to MP4 or HTML5 files.
8. Use Google Tag Manager to Organize Tracking Code
Google Tag Manager is an excellent resource that, when used correctly, can improve your website’s speed by leaps and bounds. Google Tag Manager lets you manage your site’s tracking code in a single place and makes it possible to add and remove tags from your site without messing with its code.
Content that loads with Google Tag Manager doesn’t block how your site renders its content, and migrating your tracking code is integral to achieving Shopify speed optimization.
9. Choose a Hero Layout
Home pages with several features typically use a slider or carousel to go through images and depict numerous products simultaneously. While sliders might look nice, they can slow down your page loading times and cause issues that make your website less responsive.
Instead of using sliders, you should choose a static Hero layout image. These images are a single, high-resolution picture with a dedicated call to action that eliminates the need for sliders and speeds up your site loading times. Additionally, sliders have very low click-through rates, making them highly ineffective and impractical if site optimization is your goal.
10. Host Your Videos Externally
Including product videos is an excellent way to intrigue and make people more likely to purchase your offerings. However, while videos are helpful for customers, they aren’t ideal for page loading times. Including videos for your product will deter site optimization, making it challenging to improve Shopify site speed.
A simple way to overcome this issue is by hosting your videos externally instead of directly on your website. Choose video hosting services like YouTube and Vimeo and upload your content to these platforms. You can ensure that users can still access videos by embedding them on your Shopify site pages instead of placing the video directly on your site. Problem solved!
Maximize Your Shopify Success With Transform Agency
Optimizing your Shopify store to improve page loading times is only the first step in ensuring an accessible and enjoyable user experience. Transform Agency works with e-commerce companies to ensure the best online shopping experience for customers and help you improve your site for the best shopping experience possible.
Contact us today to learn how Transform Agency can take your Shopify store to the next level!
Alex excels in creating and approving customization architecture, ensuring robust and efficient solutions for e-commerce platforms. His expertise in Magento allows him to effectively manage tech resources and drive technical projects to successful completion.
Alex excels in creating and approving customization architecture, ensuring robust and efficient solutions for e-commerce platforms. His expertise in Magento allows him to effectively manage tech resources and drive technical projects to successful completion.
