How to Speed up Shopify Website – A Detailed Guide

15 MINS READ – OCT 3, 2022

Shopify Speed Optimization is a crucial consideration for store owners. The website’s performance directly influences user conversions. Faster sites lead to higher conversion rates. Moreover, improving Shopify Store Speed would enhance the performance and positively impact SEO rankings on Google.

All digital marketing efforts, including paid, email, online reputation management, and social marketing, are affected by site speed. Subtle enhancements in performance can yield significant revenue improvements, especially if traffic from these channels is substantial.

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 refers to the process of improving the loading speed and overall performance of a Shopify website. It involves optimizing various elements like images, code and server configuration to ensure faster page load times.

By enhancing speed, it enhances the user experience, reduces bounce rates, and improves search engine rankings. In simple terms, it’s like giving your online store a turbo boost, making it faster and smoother for your customers to browse and buy products.

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. 

With the help of Google PageSpeed Insights, optimizing the Shopify store will become an easier task for you and help you find the aspects that cause your site to load poorly. However, if you are unable to perform, our experts will provide in-depth 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 vary depending on various factors, including the complexity of your store, the theme you’re using, installed apps, and the size of your product catalog. However, as a general guideline, a good speed score for a Shopify store would typically fall within the range of 60 to 90 on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

PageSpeed Insights provides a score out of 100 for both mobile and desktop versions of your website. A score above 90 is considered excellent, indicating a highly optimized and fast-loading website. Scores between 60 and 90 are still good and indicate that your store is performing well, but there may be room for improvement.

It’s important to note that while speed scores are a helpful metric, they shouldn’t be the sole focus. User experience, including factors like page interactivity and visual stability, should also be considered alongside speed optimization efforts.

Factors affecting your Shopify Store.

Let’s discover the key culprits of sluggish Shopify websites, focusing on Shopify Speed Optimization. Uncover issues and enhance loading times to ensure the optimal user experience. Learn how to increase the speed of Shopify websites for a seamless browsing experience.

• Loaded with Unoptimized Images and Videos: The Shopify Speed Score is crucial. To ensure optimal store speed, prioritize image size and video quantity. Neglecting these factors will significantly impact your store’s performance.

• Installing Unnecessary Apps: To optimize the Shopify Speed Score and enhance the store performance, it’s important to uninstall apps. Every app impacts your store’s speed, so be mindful of the ones you don’t use.

• Complicated Shopify Themes and Fonts: If your website’s code or custom fonts are complex, it can slow down loading time, affecting the Shopify Speed Score. Optimize your site to improve Shopify Store Speed and deliver a smooth browsing experience.

In the upcoming section, our main objective is to address multiple Shopify Speed issues by providing the practical solutions and illustrating them with relevant examples, while improving the Shopify Speed Score.

How to Improve Shopify Speed Score?

A responsive and quick website could mean the difference between success and failure when managing an online store. Slow loading of websites would lead to a frustrating customer experience and potentially drive away potential 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

I know you are already aware of this. However, the efficiency of your store is controlled by the theme you choose. The theme comprises CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code. These file sizes might increase as you modify or customize themes, affecting the performance of your store site and ultimately leading to the failure of the Shopify Website Speed optimization test. 

We strongly advise checking the speed of the theme demo using Google PageSpeed Insights before finalizing the theme. It will display the speed of the web page and give you a clear idea about how fast the theme is! Also you have to follow a few parameters when choosing 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

You know, the list never ends when it comes to optimizing your Shopify store, implementing push notifications, setting up marketing campaigns such as e-mail or social media, managing the inventory, viewing the reports and much more and for that reason we sometime install but after certain use we uninstall them as it is of no use. 

Don’t make the mistake of getting customized software for every part of your store that needs improvements. Select applications that are multipurpose, which means they have a variety of features that will address problems or increase store performance.

Just remember, the application you install will add some scripts to your site. These scripts are required to run the application’s functionalities, but they have a performance penalty. Look for fewer programs and less code to execute. Another useful method for increasing page performance is to uninstall any apps that you feel are slowing down the loading time.

Run your website without it and observe how rapidly your page loads. Find a replacement for the deleted program, install it, and then reload your website to see the change in loading speed. I know that this process is becoming quite complicated to execute and time taking.

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

Well, the reason behind swapping with GIFs is that it enhances the speed of your Shopify store in terms of UX and improves your branding. You’ll be glad you did. Nonetheless, you’ve got to understand that these files are usually large since they contain multiple frames. 

The best part about GIFs is that it supports animation but it’s recommended not to use large-sized images. It is true that it enhances your landing page conversions and gives a dynamic look to your page.

Image Compression

This is one of the best ways to optimize your Shopify website. To properly represent your items, you must have attractive product photos. However, if the website’s performance is restricted by the graphics, conversion rates won’t be stellar.

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 Development service is always there to assist you. 

Place Deferred Video Streaming to Use

Video is another alternative that retailers could use to boost their Shopify site performance. In this way, videos are similar to photographs. Deferred video Loading is a performance approach. This allows your site to load more quickly by postponing the loading of video resources until they’re required.

04. Selecting Fonts for your Shopify Store

While building an e-commerce site, you have to understand one thumb rule, and that is to use system fonts. Shopify’s font library includes a variety of fonts such as system fonts, Google fonts and Monotype licensed fonts. All of these fonts are free to use on any Shopify online marketplace.

You can use fonts that suit you, but just in case the font is uncommon, it would take more time for your webpage to load because those same fonts will also load on your user’s desktop. Well, there is a way around this. To load your webpage at a faster rate, you could use a customized font, and once the user’s browser has completed downloading it, switch to the 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

Well, lazy loading is a very nifty technique that can greatly improve Shopify speed score and the performance of your websites as well. By simply delaying the loading of non-critical resources until they are actually needed, lazy loading will help to reduce it’s initial load time of a web page, thereby improving the user experience and reducing the bounce rate.

Images, videos, and iframes can significantly slow down webpage load times. To combat this, lazy loading techniques can be used. Talking about the lazy loading, it will load the content that is visible to the user, such as images, videos, and automatically delay loading the rest, until the user scrolls down the page.

This will improve the page load times and reduce the amount of unnecessary data that needs to be downloaded. Lazy loading can also be applied to CSS and Javascript files to further optimize web page speed.

06. Fast and Reliable Web Hosting

Next step in the Shopify Speed Optimization process is developing a Fast and reliable web hosting that is very crucial for optimizing the speed of your Shopify website. A slow website will not only affect the frustrated customer who is there in the store.

It will not only affect your search engine ranking, but a big chunk of revenue as well. So, to rectify them, let us here some ways how fast and reliable web hosting would be a perfect choice for your store:

• Improve Server Response Time: Fast web hosting ensures your server can quickly process customer requests, resulting in a snappy and responsive website. Having a faster hosting provider will have a shorter server response time, which will result in faster page load times.

• Bandwidth: The speed at which your website data travels between your hosting providers server and visitors is restricted by the available bandwidth. A hosting provider with a greater bandwidth can move the data faster, leading to snappier page load times. So, selecting a high-bandwidth hosting provider is vital for a seamless user experience.

• Processing Power: Your hosting company’s server’s processing power may have an impact on how quickly your website loads. Slower page loading speeds may result from the server’s inability to handle several requests at once.

• Storage Speed: Think of your website as a car, and its storage system as the engine. A powerful engine will get you to your destination faster. Similarly, faster storage systems can read and write data quickly, leading to speedy page load times.

• Location: The server location of your hosting company may also have an impact on website speed. Pages may load more slowly if your hosting provider’s server is far from your users’ devices because data must travel a longer distance between the server and their devices.

07 Use Browser Caching

When you talk about the website loading times, caching will make a huge difference. When a user visits a website, the browser downloads a lot of different assets such as HTML, CSS along with images. Caching allows these assets to be stored locally, so that they don’t need to be re-download on every page load.

This would eventually make faster and better user experience while reducing the server load. Fortunately, if you use Shopify, you don’t have to worry about setting up browser caching. Shopify has fast servers and caching systems in place, so you can be confident that your websites 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.

In case, 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 aims to offer their customers an outstanding experience. We feel you do as well. As a result, it reduces the number of redirects and broken links. If your website has too many redirects and broken links, it might degrade speed and user experience. Furthermore, it has an impact on your SEO, which reduces your website’s rating and visibility on search engine result pages.

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 clarify one thing. Due to unnecessary redirects, the performance of your website slows down gradually. Data transmissions would be delayed by redirects, which leads to more HTTP requests. Reducing the number of redirects on the website and its negative effect on its performance. Apply 301 redirects to your website using Shopify’s integrated redirect feature, “URL redirect.”

Fixing or redirecting the error pages occurs when a user requests a page on your website, but the server sends the user to another page or URL instead of loading that site. It will interrupt the user’s experience as they’ve to wait until the redirect gets complete.

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

For any website, page loading time matters a lot and it’s quite obvious that the less time it would take, the better your page will load. Once a user comes onto your website and starts finding the content, then a process will start to appear where your browser is requesting and receiving the files from the server. And, the fewer the HTTP request, the faster and more efficient way it will be loaded. 

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

Apart from them, you can also use certain tools, such as Pingdom or GT matrix or some other tools as well that helps you to understand requests that your website makes along with the page load time, breaking total time duration, on different stages in the process of loading the page.

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

Conclusion

We hope this article has provided you with valuable insights on optimizing the speed of your Shopify store. By implementing the suggested pointers, you can enhance the performance of your website and create a seamless shopping experience for your customers. When functionalities are not utilized correctly, it can lead to a slower website.

We are confident that the recommendations mentioned in this article will help to understand how to increase shopify store speed and improve the overall performance of your Shopify website. If you encounter any issues with your store, we offer a Shopify Speed Optimization Service.

Thank you for reading our blog.

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