A Guide to Shopify Speed Optimization

One of the important considerations for every Shopify store owner is its performance. Its performance directly affects the store’s ability to convert visitors into customers. The quicker your site loads, the more visitors will convert into shoppers. Additionally, it will affect your store’s ranking in the Google algorithm.

In addition to this, the performance of the online store affects all other digital marketing strategies as well. Whether it’s paid, SEO, email, affiliate, or social marketing, Shopify’s page speed affects the user’s engagement. Even if your store is getting a fair amount of traffic from these channels, then just a small change in the performance can help in improving the revenue.

This is why it is vital that your Shopify store performs well for the success of your store in the online market. Speeding up your Shopify page may not only help in enhancing your customer’s experience but will also affect your bottom line positively.

What Is Shopify Speed Optimization?

Shopify speed optimization is a process where you can optimize the Shopify store to increase the page speed of the online store. It helps in increasing conversions, generating good traffic to the stores, returning better ROI, and ranking higher on the search engine result pages.

Why Speed Up A Shopify Store Page?

The site’s speed gives the e-store visitors the first impression. You may not even have a second chance if your site is downloading slowly. Slow page loading leads to frustration of users and they can leave your site, which will directly affect the volume of sales.

There are many different factors that may affect the timing of your website loading and in this Shopify speed optimization tutorial, we will reveal the most common issues. Let’s move on!

7 Ways to Optimize Shopify Store’s Page Speed

Optimizing the Shopify store’s page speed is a major priority. Without doing so, you’ll probably miss out on traffic and revenue. Additionally, you’ll end up ranking lower on the search result pages.

Because of these factors, it is important that you emphasize optimizing the Shopify store’s page speed. Want to know how you can do it?

Here are some of the tried and tested ways, try them out!

1. Compress Images:

</One of the best ways of optimizing the Shopify page speed is through compression. There are many apps available in the app store, or you can even take tools like TinyPNG to help you achieve the goal. Using them will ensure that the image quality doesn’t get damaged.

Higher resolution images are larger files that slow down the page speed loading time. Thus, it is always advisable that you use compressed images when uploading them to your Shopify store.

Here are some of the pro tips!

• To reduce the image size without getting it affected adversely, go for a lossless compress.
• If the images are already uploaded to your Shopify store, use one of the Shopify apps to compress the images.
• Upload images of the exact dimensions required for that page. For example, if the product page’s banner stands out at 1200 X 400, go for uploading the image with those dimensions.
• Similarly, upload images of products with the same dimensions. It will help in keeping the image quality intact when a visitor zooms in.

2. Implement AMP:

AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, was built by Google to speed up the mobile web. It converts Shopify sections into AMP and indexes it to Google to improve page load speed time, faster mobile loading page, and higher rankings on search results.

By the next year, e-commerce sales through mobile devices are expected to reach around 54%. Thus, Shopify stores ought to be mobile-friendly with lightning-speed page loading time. With AMP, it enables the users to get hands-on faster loading sites on mobile devices.

AMP isn’t implemented natively on the Shopify store. To implement it, one may have to use apps like Sheriff, FireAMP, and RocketAmp app. The process of implementing AMP requires a lot of hard work, but it is worth the outcome. It gives you great loading website page speed.

3. Apply Lazy Loading:

Lazy loading is used for delaying the loading of objects or images until they’re needed. In this, the images will not load at once unless the visitor scrolls down. It greatly helps in reducing the burden of the page since the browser doesn’t load the content simultaneously.

No doubt, all e-commerce sites are loaded with many images of the products they offer. When a visitor clicks on the store’s link, the browser starts to load all the available content on the site which takes a great deal of time. This becomes frustrating for visitors, and they leave the site if loading takes more than 2-3 seconds.

Thus, with lazy loading, the website doesn’t preload. Instead, the browser starts to load the content that the visitor likes to see first. The content starts to load when the visitor scrolls down the store.

4. Optimize JavaScript & CSS:

One of the most effective options for speeding up the Shopify store is through optimizing the JS and CSS. So, how can you optimize the JS and CSS? Let’s have a look at it!

• Eliminate the render-blocking JS and CSS. This way, you can change the load priority and ensure that CSS and JS resources don’t load until the front visible part of the store gets loaded.
• Minify the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When a Shopify store loads, every website counts CSS, HTML, and JS files. It leads to extra loading times. Thus, minifying or compacting the code may help save data and improve page speed load time.

The above-mentioned steps need help from a professional Shopify developer. In case, you wish to optimize the page speed load time of your Shopify store, reach out to us!

5. Limit the Shopify Apps & Third-Party Resources:

To improve the user experience on your Shopify store, people use Shopify apps. These apps enable customization options without the need for developers even.

On one side, you get an app that gives you ready-made functionalities and you don’t need the additional functionalities and features required on your store from scratch. On the other side, it affects many HTTP requests altogether.

Other than the Shopify apps, you can use third-party apps to have the same features and functionalities. But, it affects your store’s performance adversely. The HTTP requests take a longer time to load and thus, you must check tracking codes and third-party resources regularly.

6. Apply a Lightweight Shopify Theme:

Picking up a light Shopify theme can put your website at a point where performance plays a big role. Some Shopify themes might come along with a box full of unnecessary codes which affect your store’s speed adversely. Fortunately, a lightweight theme will make your site move forward with great speed.

Here are some of the top-performing themes that you can use:

• Create Theme (1.1 FCP, 7.8 TTI)
• Toy Theme (1.1 FCP, 7.7 TTI)
• Warm Theme (1.9 FCP, 7.8 TTI)
• Light Theme (1.1 FCP, 7.8 TTI)
• Outdoors Theme (1.1 FCP, 8.1 TTI)

Well, we aren’t denying that high-performing themes can’t work slower or these are the only best options for your site. But, if you want to optimize the Shopify page speed, these themes might prove to be of great help to you and you must consider picking one of them.

7. Migrate the Tracking Codes to the Google Tag Manager:

Google Tag Manager is one of the best ways of adding or removing tags from your Shopify store without having to touch the code.

One best thing about this is that it loads all the code asynchronously. Moreover, the code that’s loaded on the Google Tag Manager doesn’t block the rendering of your store’s content.

To move the tracking code to Google Tag Manager, follow the below-mentioned steps:

• Add Google Tag Manager to your Shopify store
• Scroll down until you find Tags > New. Then you need to look for the built-in tags in the “Tag Types”
•  Next, implement the tags on Google Tag Manager.
• In case you aren’t able to find any built-in tags choose the “Custom HTML” and add your tags
• Set the triggering properly to “All Pages”
• Save all the changes in your Google Tag Manager.
•  Navigate and remove all the apps that you have added through the Google Tag Manager.
• Visit your Shopify stores and test that all the tags are working properly.

Bottom Line

In this competitive era, any Shopify store owner needs to get a massive amount of traffic to the website. To achieve that goal, speed and page loading time plays a crucial role in the growth of the store.

If the store loads quickly and displays all the site’s content to its visitors at once, it enhances the customer experience and builds awareness about the brand. The visitors can easily get converted to shoppers only if the store provides them with a smooth experience.

We hope that the above tips are enough to help you optimize the Shopify page speed time and enhance the customer experience.

If you have additional queries in mind about Shopify speed optimization, do share them in the comments section.