How to Speed up Shopify Website – A Detailed Guide

Improving Shopify speed is very important for store owners. A fast website helps more visitors become customers. Faster websites get more sales. Also, making your Shopify store faster can improve how your site ranks on Google.

All digital marketing activities, like paid ads, emails, managing online reputation, and social media, are influenced by how fast a website loads. Small improvements in speed can lead to big increases in revenue, especially if many people visit the site from these channels.

Therefore, prioritizing Shopify Speed Optimization not only enhances user experience but also amplifies the store’s overall digital marketing success. Take action now and boost your store’s potential for increased conversions and revenue growth.

What is Shopify Speed Optimization?

Shopify Speed Optimization means making a Shopify website load faster and work better. It includes improving things like pictures, website code, and server setup to help pages open more quickly.

Making things faster helps users have a better time, keeps them on your site longer, and helps your site show up higher in search results. Simply put, it’s like adding a turbo to your online store, making it quicker and easier for customers to look at and buy items.

So now I would like to provide you with some stats to help you have a better understanding:

• Websites experience a decline in engagement rate by an average of 4.42% for every additional second of load time.
• Skilled reports indicate that around 80% of visitors who encounter any performance issues are likely to become repeat customers.

Need more evidence? HubSpot provides additional insights:

• Each extra second of load time results in an average decrease of 4.42% in website conversion rates.
• The impact on conversion rates is most significant within the first five seconds of page loading.
• Websites that display content in under two seconds achieve the fastest eCommerce conversion rates.
• Page views directly affect your website’s accessibility and overall effectiveness.

How to Check Shopify Store Speed?

We recommend you to use Google PageSpeed Insights to evaluate your web pages and identify the portions of your website that raise page load time. 

Using Google PageSpeed Insights makes it easier to improve your Shopify store’s speed and find out what makes your site load slowly. If you need more help, our experts will give you detailed information.

Apart from Google PageSpeed Insight, there are other tools as well that you can use. 

• GT Metrix
• WebPage Test
• Pingdom Speed Test
• Uptrends 

What is a Good Shopify Speed Score?

Shopify store speed scores can change based on different things like how complicated your store is, the theme you choose, the apps you have, and how many products you sell. Usually, a good speed score for a Shopify store is between 60 and 90 according to Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

PageSpeed Insights gives your website a score from 0 to 100 for mobile and desktop. A score over 90 is very good, showing your website loads quickly and is well-optimized. Scores between 60 and 90 are still good, meaning your website works well, but there’s a chance to make it even better.

Speed scores are useful, but they aren’t the only thing to think about. The user’s experience matters too. You should also pay attention to how interactive the page is and how stable it looks while you’re working on speed improvements.

Factors Affecting your Shopify Store.

Let’s find out why some Shopify websites are slow and how to make them faster. We will look for problems that cause delays and fix them to help users enjoy a better experience. Learn how to speed up Shopify websites for smooth browsing.

• Loaded with Unoptimized Images and Videos: The Shopify Speed Score is very important. To keep your store running fast, focus on the size of images and the number of videos you use. Ignoring these things will hurt your store’s performance.

• Installing Unnecessary Apps: To improve your Shopify store’s speed, it’s important to remove unused apps. Every app can slow down your store, so only keep the ones you really need.

• Complicated Shopify Themes and Fonts: If your website has complicated code or fonts, it can take longer to load, which can lower your Shopify Speed Score. Make your site simpler to help it load faster and give customers a better browsing experience.

In the next part, we will focus on fixing different Shopify Speed problems. We will give easy solutions and show examples to help improve the Shopify Speed Score.

Look Results, that how our Shopify Development Team has Eliminate the Issues and Improve the Overall Experience.

Improve Speed Score by Shopify Speed Optimization

A fast and easy-to-use website can be very important for running an online store. If a website takes too long to load, customers might get upset and leave, which can cause you to lose sales.

That’s why Shopify Speed optimization is crucial for ensuring a smooth shopping experience. Let’s understand some of the tips that help you optimize your Shopify store speed and keep your customers happy.

There are several ways to improve the speed of Shopify websites so that you can get answers on how to Improve Shopify Speed Score.

01. Update Theme: Fast and Responsive

You already know this, but your store’s performance depends on the theme you choose. The theme includes CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code. When you change or customize themes, these file sizes can grow. This can slow down your store and cause it to fail the Shopify Website Speed test.

We recommend checking how fast the theme demo loads using Google PageSpeed Insights before you decide on a theme. It will show you the speed of the webpage and help you understand how fast the theme is. You also need to keep a few key points in mind when picking the right Shopify theme.

Although, in one of our blogs of Fastest Shopify Theme, we have recommended Booster Theme in the number one option. And, the best part about the booster theme is that it comes with some cool features with top-notch site speed.

 

 

02. Optimize your Shopify Apps

There is always something to improve in your Shopify store. You can add push notifications, create marketing campaigns like emails or social media ads, manage your inventory, and check reports. Because there are so many options, we sometimes try new tools but end up removing them later because they don’t help us.

Don’t try to get special software for every area of your store that needs help. Instead, choose apps that can do many things. These apps will solve problems and help your store work better.

The app you install will add some scripts to your site. These scripts help the app work, but they can slow down your site. Try to use fewer apps and have less code running. Another way to make your site faster is to remove any apps that you think are making it load slowly.

Remove the program from your website and watch how fast your page loads. Find a new program to replace it, install the new program, and then refresh your website to check if it loads faster. I understand this process can be a bit tricky and take a lot of time.

Don’t forget to check out our Boostify App which is an AI-integrated page speed optimizer app. The app is designed solely for the purpose of improving your core web vitals score which will ultimately improve the Shopify Speed Score.

03. Image Optimization

Shopify automatically applies security measures to stop website owners from adding too much visual content, such as images and videos. You must remember one thing, you can display as many products as you want until you don’t surpass Shopify Product Restriction of 50 products per page.

Many themes load pictures of a particular size depending on the size of the screen they are displaying, or they delay loading images that are not currently visible on the screen. Below, you can see How to Optimize Images for Shopify Speed.

 

 

Swap Out GIFs for Static Images

Using GIFs can make your Shopify store faster and help with your branding. You’ll be happy with the results. Just remember, these files can be big because they have many pictures in them.

GIFs are great because they can show moving images, but it’s best not to use big files. They can help increase the number of visitors who take action on your website and make your page look more lively.

Image Compression

One of the best ways to improve your Shopify website is to have nice product photos. Beautiful pictures help show off your products. But, if the images slow down the website, it can hurt sales.

Every eCommerce shop depends on images to function. Although many plugins would help you to compress the images, to load your site efficiently. If you are not aware of the plugin, our Shopify store setup services is always there to assist you. 

Place Deferred Video Streaming to Use

Video is another option for stores to improve their Shopify websites. Videos work like pictures. Deferred video loading is a method that helps your site load faster by waiting to load videos until they are needed.

04. Selecting Fonts for your Shopify Store

When creating an online store, remember to use system fonts. Shopify has many fonts you can choose from, including system fonts, Google fonts, and Monotype fonts. You can use all of these fonts for free on any Shopify store.

You can choose fonts that you like, but if the font is not common, it might slow down how fast your webpage loads. This is because the special font also needs to be loaded on the user’s computer. To help your webpage load faster, you can use a custom font. When the user’s browser finishes downloading it, you can switch to that custom font.

So, if you aren’t able to perform it from your end, you can even outsource it to a Shopify Speed Optimization Expert.

 

05. Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a smart way to make your Shopify site load faster. It works by waiting to load things that aren’t needed right away until they are actually required. This helps your web page open quicker, making it easier for visitors to use your site and lowering the chance that they will leave without exploring.

Pictures, videos, and certain types of content can make webpages load slowly. To help with this, we can use a method called lazy loading. This means that only the content visible on the screen will load first, like images and videos. The rest will load later when the user scrolls down the page.

This will make web pages load faster and use less data. Lazy loading can also be used for CSS and JavaScript files to make the pages even quicker.

 

06. Fast and Reliable Web Hosting

The next step to make your Shopify store faster is to set up a good web hosting service. This is important for speeding up your website. If your website is slow, it can frustrate customers who visit your store.

It will hurt your search engine ranking and reduce your income. To fix this, here are some reasons why fast and reliable web hosting is a great choice for your store:

• Improve Server Response Time: Fast web hosting helps your server quickly handle customer requests. This makes your website quick and responsive. A faster hosting service means your server responds more quickly, which leads to faster page loading.

• Bandwidth: The speed of your website depends on how much data can travel at once. If your hosting provider has more bandwidth, your website will load faster. Choosing a hosting provider with high bandwidth is important for a smooth experience for visitors.

• Processing Power: The power of your hosting company’s server can affect how fast your website loads. If the server cannot handle many requests at the same time, your pages may load more slowly.

• Storage Speed: Think of your website like a car. The storage system is like the engine. A strong engine helps the car go faster. In the same way, quicker storage systems help your website load pages faster.

• Location: The place where your hosting company keeps its server can affect how fast your website works. If the server is far away from your users, the website pages might load slowly because data has to travel a longer distance.

07 Use Browser Caching

When you talk about how fast a website loads, caching is very important. When someone visits a website, their browser downloads various things like HTML, CSS, and images. Caching helps by saving these items on their device, so they don’t have to be downloaded again each time the page loads.

This will make using the website faster and easier while putting less strain on the server. If you use Shopify, you don’t need to worry about browser caching. Shopify has fast servers and caching built-in, so your website will load quickly.

One very important thing to consider is to set an expiration date for your cache. In case you are not updating your site, you can set the “expire” header to one year, which will reduce the server load and speed up the page load times. You want some more access to more information about browser caching and understand them in a precise way, you can Access The Guide from here.

08. Fix Broken Links

Every seller wants to give their customers a great experience. We believe you want this too. Having fewer redirects and broken links helps your website run better. If your site has too many of these issues, it can slow down and make it hard for people to use. This can also hurt your SEO, which means your website might not show up well on search engine results.

Let me tell you one thing, if you don’t Fix your Broken Links it will affect your SEO adversely. When it saw the message “Error 404, the page is unavailable.” There are certain tools and Shopify apps to detect broken links.

• Broken Link 404/301 Redirect
• Dead Link Checker
• Dr. Link Check

 

 

• Reducing the Redirects

Let me explain something important. Unnecessary redirects make your website slower. They cause delays in sending data and lead to more requests. You should reduce the number of redirects to improve your website’s performance. Use Shopify’s built-in feature called “URL redirect” to set up 301 redirects on your site.

Fixing or changing error pages happens when someone tries to open a page on your website, but instead, the server takes them to a different page or address. This can interrupt their experience because they have to wait for the change to happen.

However, there are two types of redirects:

• 301 redirects depict that the website is moved Permanently from the search engine.
• 302 redirects depict that the website is moved Temporarily from the search engine.

09. Reduce HTTP Requests

Page loading time is very important for any website. The quicker the page loads, the better it is for users. When someone visits your website, their browser asks the server for files to show the content. If there are fewer requests for files, the page will load faster and work better.

Let’s understand some important points that help you to make fewer HTTP requests to your site and boost the speed of your site.

• Eliminate the Number of Unnecessary Shopify Apps.
• Perform Lazy Loading of Images.
• Execute Code Minification

You can use tools like Pingdom or GTmetrix to see how your website works. They help you understand the requests your website makes and how long it takes to load the page.

Also read: How to Reduce Unused JavaScript in Your Shopify Store

Conclusion

We hope this article has helped you learn how to make your Shopify store faster. By following the tips we shared, you can improve your website and make shopping easier for your customers. If features are not used properly, your website may become slower.

We believe the tips in this article will help you make your Shopify store faster and better. If you have any problems with your store, we offer a service to help improve its speed. Thank you for reading our blog.

 

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