Shopify Store Speed Optimization - Tips from a Shopify Expert

Shopify Store Speed Optimization

Your Shopify Page Speed is more important than ever. In this article, I'll give you some tips on how to optimize your Shopify store for the best store speed and overall performance.

First off, why the hell even bother? Why is Shopify Page Speed important? Well, there are a few reasons, but I'll only touch on two points:

Time = Money

Based on this detailed Medium Article by UX Researcher Viki Green:

Around 40% of users will drop off a website page if it takes over 3 seconds to load. This means that if your store is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second delay in page load time could cost you over $2.5 million in lost sales each year. The slower the page loads, the higher the chance of the user dropping off the page. 

Slow to load = Slow to find

Google announced in 2018 that page speed will be one of the factors taken into account as an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) ranking factor for mobile searches. This means if your website has a slow page load speed, it will affect how well it ranks.  Considering that a study by StatCounter found that 50.48% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, by not optimizing Shopify's store speed for mobile devices, you will be losing a considerable amount of sales!

Okay, on to the meat and potatoes of this article 😉

How Do You Improve Your Shopify Store's Speed?

  • Minimize the Number of Frontend Apps Installed
    • Frontend apps reduce your store's site speed. These include review apps, popup modal apps, subscription apps, banner apps, and anything that loads design elements onto your store. There are many cool apps on the Shopify App Store, but you need to perform a cost-benefit analysis and remove the apps that you aren't using often to avoid them negatively affecting your Shopify site performance.
  • Add Lazy Load to Images
    • The lazy loading attribute delays loading off-screen images until they are needed. This can significantly improve your Shopify page load time by reducing the number of resources loaded upfront.
  • Compress and Reduce Images
    • To increase the speed of your Shopify Store, you can also compress image files. This reduces the resources needed to load large images, improving your Shopify site speed. Use apps from the Shopify App Store to simplify this process. Alternatively, tools like TinyPNG can help if you're handling images manually. Search the app store for "image compression" to find suitable tools.
  • Replace Sliders with a Hero Image
    • Slider elements and front-page video elements can drastically reduce site speed. A single, well-designed hero image can have the same visual impact as a video or multiple images without the negative performance effects!

There you have it—a short and sweet list of tips on how to optimize your Shopify store for better page load time and performance!

Faster load speed = Higher conversion

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