Easy steps to improve your Shopify store speed

If you've recently been experiencing a steady decline in conversion rates and an increase in bounce rates, or if these figures have been unimpressive from the start, page speed may be to blame.

According to Think With Google, a delay of one second in some instances increases the bounce rate by 32%. With site speed, every second matters. One second might be too much time for your site to load. The ideal site speed score for seamless online shopping according to Google tag manager is half a second.

Having a slow site speed on Shopify is bad news for any serious business owner or entrepreneur, and must be addressed swiftly.

Now, overall site speed is dependent on several factors and some of these factors are out of your control. For example, consider the internet speed of your customers and clients, their devices, as well as location or image files. There is simply no point in fussing over these.

There are, however, lots of other factors that you can alter to improve your Shopify speed. Let's take a look at how you can improve your store's speed to deliver a better customer experience.

How do I determine my Shopify site speed?

The first step to enhance your website speed on Shopify is to acknowledge that it's below average, or that it has suffered a decline. This can only be noticed with close monitoring and careful attention.

Studying your page Shopify site speed also helps you to see other areas of your e-commerce site that might need optimization. For instance in shopify page speed optimization, instead of poor SEO, the root of your high bounce rates may be a slow loading time.

Find your page speed by clicking on Shopify Status or Online Store Speed on Shopify. Make sure you have a good Shopify speed score.

How to increase Shopify store speed

Decrease your page loading time by probing into Shopify speed optimization of the following:

1. Learn to compress images

Large, high-quality images are probably the largest contributors to long loading times. This may sound like a nightmare to someone who intends to make their page attractive by using lots of eye-catching images.

It's possible to achieve clear high-quality images that do not take up so much space or cause your page to load slowly.

You can use free tools like TinyPNG or JPEG Optimizer to compress and optimize images for your site.

If you intend to compress images on your site, uploaded pictures must be presented in acceptable formats.

2. Delete apps you don't use/need

Another potential space-eater comes in the form of Shopify apps. These apps were originally designed to make shopping easier, but if they're not in use, they're better deleted.

This doesn't mean you should delete all the apps that improve the shopping experience on your product page, but you should carefully weigh the pros and cons of each app and consider which is worth the extra time.

Shopify Apps like Lucky Orange, for example, have been proven to not slow down e-commerce store speed. 

Alongside deleting apps you no longer use, make sure you clear the cache stored by apps you once installed but immediately deleted. The app may no longer be installed, but a tiny bit of its information is usually left behind. These little drops may be the cause of the resulting low conversion rate.

3. Revise your theme selection

As with most other considerations on your e-commerce site, the choice of a theme is fundamental to online business owners.

A dull theme may discourage prospective buyers, but so will a product page that takes forever to load. The key to improving page speed and by extension, business progress, is found in the delicate balance between page speed and theme.

To optimize your theme selection, ensure that the theme is fast and doesn't set back your progress. Theme speed can be monitored on Google's PageSpeed Insights. It also offers suggestions on how to make your theme work quicker.

Using the most recent version of your theme also prevents slow loading time. This can be due to older versions using unsupported widgets and receiving less general upkeep. load speed

4. Minimize redirects and broken links

Apart from slowing down your site, page redirects can be particularly frustrating to online shoppers. Page redirects when users click on send users to a different page. 

For a faster e-commerce store speed, consider getting rid of redirects and broken links where possible and optimize your content delivery network.

To edit the redirects found on your page, visit:

Shopify admin> Online Store> Navigation> URL redirect.

While some redirects may be necessary to maintain your store, keeping them to a minimum will help prevent slower Shopify load times.

5. Swap slides for hero images

While slides are surely easier to use and have more flexibility, they may be eating up too much time and causing your page to load slowly.

Slides usually contain 4-6 graphics or images accompanied with text, which slides across the screen in a gallery format. They're the most common form of website images, but statistics show that they're bad for SEO. If you aim to improve page speed, consider swapping out the sliding images and text for a static hero image.

A hero image is a single, solid image with a clear Call to Action. Static images in general are comparatively better for mobile devices and produce better page layouts. 

6. Take the bold step with AMP

Last but not the least, change your game with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP can increase your page speed by leaps and bounds.

You can create the AMP version of existing pages, or create new pages with AMP by using apps such as Shopify API, FireAMP, or RocketAMP.

Doing this only improves the speed of pages being viewed from mobile phones. This is quite convenient as 79% of online shoppers make orders from their mobile phones.

Bonus: Other effective ways to remove page speed limiters

• Rework your page features: This should be done carefully or else you'll end up with a super-fast, but super-boring page. Find out what features your audience isn't paying attention to with the Heatmap tool.

• Reducing font size: Downloading a new font on your customers' device costs a few milliseconds. Using a more popular font that already exists on your customers' devices will help you increase page speed.

When optimizing page speed, start with the most obvious options and monitor the changes in bounce rate, click-through rate and conversion rate. If the problem seems to be more than you can handle, contact your web developer or hire an expert.

Hire a Shopify speed expert

The best way to improve your Shopify store's Core Web Vitals is to hire a world-class development agency like EcomExperts.io.

We ensure your Shopify store loads faster, improving page user experience. This way, your store performance would be greatly improved, and your store ranks a lot higher in Google search rankings.