For merchants looking to increase sales and user flow throughout their Shopify stores, one of the best ways to achieve this is by making it much easier for users to navigate.
With more consumers now shopping from their phones and seeking the best shopping experience, it’s never been more important to have a fast Shopify store.
This article will show you how you can increase your Shopify store speed significantly with just a few speed optimisation tactics.
In this article, Rainy City Agency - Shopify Plus the design and development experts show you how you can increase your Shopify store speed:
Quick Steps to Optimise Shopify Store Loading Speed
-First, focus on the user experience by streamlining the shopping process and making it as easy as possible for customers to find what they’re looking for.
-Second, invest in a Shopify theme that is designed to be fast and lightweight.
-Third, use Shopify’s built-in image compression tool to reduce the size of your product images.
-Fourth, make sure you are using a content delivery network (CDN) to speed up the delivery of your store’s assets.
-Finally, run regular speed tests to check your progress and identify any areas that need further improvement.
By following these simple tips, you can dramatically increase the speed of your Shopify store and improve
Compress images in your eCommerce store
When it comes to boosting conversions on your eCommerce store, images are absolutely essential. When it comes to an online store, well-chosen images of each item are required so that customers understand exactly what they're buying.
High-resolution photos, on the other hand, are generally larger files that can significantly slow down page loads. On the other side, there's no way to reduce picture quality when uploading pictures.
Suggestions:
- Choose lossless compression if you want to reduce picture sizes without sacrificing image quality. Use JPEGmini or Kraken.io to compress pictures before uploading them to a website.
- If the images are already on the site, use one of Shopify's many apps to compress them.
- The size of an image is determined by its dimensions and quality. As a result, it's best to submit photos with the exact measurements required for that page. If the home page banner has a width of 1500 pixels and a height of 500 pixels, for example, upload an image with exactly those dimensions.
- The recommended product image resolution for Shopify is 2048 X 2048, which ensures that when someone zooms in on an image, the quality does not get ruined. However, if people use a lot of these dimensions with their images, the site may become sluggish. 800 X 800 pictures are sufficient in this situation. This will go a long way toward speeding up Shopify sites.
Optimise Your Shopify Tech Stack
Most, if not all Shopify merchants use a variety of third-party apps to optimise user experience within their store. However, many of these apps utilize scripts on Shopify sites, reducing page performance.
Take a look at the apps in your Shopify store. Are all of them in use? Take time to evaluate your analytics to see if the app is still performing and delivering on your KPIs.
It's worth noting that after an app is removed, it does not entirely go away. An app adds its own code to a Shopify website when it is installed so that it can operate.
Suggestions:
- When you uninstall an app, the injected one isn't instantly removed. It's necessary to manually delete this code in order to avoid Shopify from slowing down. Website code that is bloated will reduce page load speeds.
- Finally, certain apps include new Shopify store page elements. If at all feasible, keep these features to areas where they are genuinely required. If an app provides floating trust badges on the shop, for example, use them only on product pages since that is where they are truly needed.
Implement Accelerated Mobile Pages
Google developed Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to speed up the mobile web. This program converts parts of a Shopify store to AMP and indexes these pages with Google to improve mobile page loading time, increase mobile search placement, and enhance SEO.
Every Shopify website must be mobile-friendly, and each web page must load rapidly. This is made possible with AMP, which allows users to browse the internet more quickly on their phones.
Consider a Shopify Agency
There are a few things that require the expertise of a professional Shopify developer to resolve. Several of these problems can be resolved by skilled Shopify developers:
- In JavaScript/CSS-intensive websites, specific blocks of JS and CSS code may raise page load times as well as prevent the page from rendering. The browser must load the JS scripts and CSS before loading the rest of the HTML on the web page. As a result, people with slower internet connections have to wait longer for pages to load. As a result, such scripts and stylesheets are known as render-blocking JavaScript and CSS. To fix this problem, the website must prioritize script loading.
- Minifying HTML and JavaScript: Websites contain many files with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. The majority of these files include space, comments, block separators, and the like. Naturally, this causes the page to take longer to load correctly. Reduce the amount of code in your HTML document as well as any inline JavaScript and CSS. This helps to save data while also speeding up loading time. This is generally better left to experts.
Keep in mind that consumers don’t want to sit around and wait for pages to load. With an abundance of competitors, marketplaces and more, if they don’t find what they’re looking for quickly then you’ll miss out on conversions.