How to Make Shopify Store Load Faster – Works Like A Charm!
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In the initial stages of using a Shopify store, it runs at a quick pace. Mainly because Shopify’s host is one the best, they offer unlimited bandwidth and CDN. But gradually, as you start loading more customizations and applications to drive more traffic and increase sales, you will end up reducing your store speed. It is because the overall size of your store increases and generates bloat. High functionality might make your website appealing, but the bounce rate will increase if it takes too long to open. Removing these resources will make your website back to normal. But then you won’t be able to take full advantage of all the features Shopify offers. Fortunately, there are some strategic ways through which you can have both functionality and speed for your website.
How does slow speed affect your store?
Slow speed will lower your site performance resulting in dissatisfying customers. It increases bounce rates, reduces traffic and conversions, all leading in declining sales. With the expansion of the online shopping industry, customers won’t wait more than a few seconds to load your web pages. They will quickly visit sites with greater performance.
Google also doesn’t appreciate this lack on your website, whether it is a paid or organic search. It will affect your SEO ranking, and for a paid search, you will decrease your Google Adwords quality. In July 2018, Google announced website speed is a ranking factor for both desktop and mobile searches. You can check the grade of your website speed through Google Pagespeed Insights. They will also give you suggestions to help you load your page faster.
How to speed up your Shopify store?
Here are some of the useful ways you can apply in making your store load faster
Compress image size
The image size for your website is responsible for the increase in your store’s weight as it takes up to 50-75% of the store’s space. Before uploading any image, reduce the image size without affecting the quality. Luckily, there are multiple free tools you can find on Google for this work like TinyPNG or TinyJPG. It will save a lot of data on your website. Start optimizing all the images you uploaded before. Also, only add images you absolutely need and cut down the rest.
Furthermore, high-resolution images are important for the outlook of your website but also understand they use more space than any standard images. Hence, try to use as few high-resolution images as possible. Check your code for any empty image sources. It will result in sending an unnecessary request from the browser to your server.
Limit resource intense customizations
Avoid any customization that adds a huge amount of resources to your store. For example, any free themes or a premium theme that provides a lot of customization as standard. Another popular customization is the carousel. Hence, carefully think whether using these features really help to grow your business or not. This feature adds to your home page as thumbnails by gathering information from product pages. The problem begins when the product image size gets pulled out bigger than required. Use Shopify’s built-in image size parameters to solve this issue. It downloads the smallest image without compromising the quality.
After knowing the image size it is going to display, it cut down the file size downloaded from CDN accordingly. Now all the built-in Shopify themes provide appropriate image size depending on the device viewpoint. You can also use srcset and Lazy Load to pull suitable image sizes. Another way to reduce customizations is by reviewing your site regularly. Find out specific pages or elements that take some time to load like your homepage. Then ultimately, get rid of the customizations slowing them down.
Use speed optimized and device-responsive theme
Your website’s overall speed majorly depends on the theme you have chosen. The reason sites tend to avoid using free themes is that they are not speed optimized. In fact, some premium themes also lack in this category. While choosing a theme, make sure they are mainly designed for speed optimization. For example, eCom Turbo loads extremely fast and reduces general bloat to decrease bounce rates. Or else, use PageSpeed Insights, a Google Labs tool to understand the speed level of your page. They will also tell you which areas are slowing down your speed like CSS and JavaScript and how to improve them. You can also check the preview page of a premium theme before buying it to about its problems. Also, check your competitor’s site performance and understand what’s wrong on their site and then fix it on your website.
Another factor to check in a theme is whether they are device responsive or not for better engagement. This feature maintains the speed of your site in every device, including mobile. They detect the device customers are using and show images and files accordingly. It is important due to the increase of mobile generated sales.
Optimize files
Files and coding are essential aspects of a successful website as they are the building block of every site. By making any change into the store, you will end up changing the underlying code too. It results in unnecessary bloating and increases your site size. To avoid this situation, you have to optimize files by merging them together. But to do this, you have to understand Shopify’s coding language- Liquid. But it can be difficult for someone who doesn’t have any coding knowledge. For them, premium themes help a lot as the files already come in combined and reduced form.
For coding experts, know that forloop iteration is one of the reasons behind slow loading. Forloop means to make the system loop(like crawling) all the products in a collection and takes place when it’s looking for conditions like price or tags. These can happen when multiple developers are working on a theme resulting in a duplicate task. Review the theme code properly to know the liquid forloops aren’t running multiple times to gather the same information. You can also use Findify. They reduce the load time of product collection by a huge amount.
Manage applications
Installing applications to your website has a lot of upsides like increase functionality and driving more sales. But unfortunately, they also have some downsides. The more apps you install, the more resource you will require, and a custom JavaScript also gets downloaded to your store. Some of the apps are for reviews, pop-ups, newsletter signups, social media sharing, and many more. They load the JavaScript files all the time, even if you are not using them. This action causes slow speed for your site. Though Shopify loads fast enough, installing too many apps can affect your site performance. Hence, remove any apps you are not using currently.
After that, check your site in page speed tests like GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, or Chrome’s developer tools, a manual test. Another way to manage apps without compromising functionality is by purchasing themes like eCom Turbo. They provide you with every necessary application, including countdown timers, upsells, urgency tickers, and more. And the great part is these apps already come integrated into the theme’s coding, so it doesn’t affect the store’s loading time.
Conclusion
It doesn’t matter if you have high functionality or every app to make your site fancy. Slow loading will greatly impact your website. It will automatically reduce sales with the increase of bounce rates as people won’t wait with patience for your site to load when there are other high-performance websites. Therefore, go through these suggestions if you are facing a slow website as site speed is your priority. Though these recommendations are easy to follow, you need to have the patience to get your results. And soon, your website will return to its original speed. However, if you still haven’t noticed any improvements, connect with Shopify’s support team. They will help you solve your problem.
I’d suggest you try out eCom Turbo to boost your speed and conversions.
