Running a Shopify store doesn’t mean that you only compete in terms of products and services with your competitors; you also compete in terms of website performance, engagement, smoother user browsing experience, and a seamless checkout experience.
To address these challenges, many Shopify stores add third-party apps and integrations, personalization features, and modern design elements. These capabilities, although intended to boost customer experience, mostly end up impacting the Shopify store speed and overall performance, leading to increases page weight, slow loading times, and reduced conversions, etc. This is when you realize the importance of Shopify store speed optimization.
Our Shopify performance optimization guide is designed with an approach to help store owners optimize their Shopify eCommerce platforms for speed, core web vitals, and overall performance.
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Why You Need to Improve Shopify Store Performance?
Your Shopify store’s performance is directly related to your rankings on the SERPs, advertising efficiency, revenue, and customer retention.
- The customer acquisition cost on Shopify stores has increased by 43%; thus, an inefficient or slow-performing website can quickly erode your marketing efforts and ROI.
- If your Shopify store loads in around 2.5 seconds, then your store is performing well for conversions. But beyond that, every second can impact your conversion rate and search rankings.
- 79% of the Shopify store traffic comes from mobile devices, so if you have not paid attention to the mobile responsiveness when partnering for shopify development services, then you might lose a significant customer base.
Many other factors, like Shopify Core Web Vitals optimization, also impact the store’s performance. So, if you want your Shopify website to scale year-by-year with consistent rankings, conversions, and retention, you must focus on improving the speed and overall performance of your Shopify store.
Top Reasons that Contribute to the Slow Speed of Your Shopify Store
In terms of technical framework, the Shopify store is built on a solid foundation that includes:
- A global CDN
- Optimized hosting platform
- HTTP/2 support
- Server-side rendering
- Image optimization
However, despite this strong framework, many Shopify stores experience slow speeds because of:
- Multiple third-party apps and integrations.
- Strong overloaded themes
- Heavy page builders
- Poor image optimization
- Unrequired and unnecessary scripts.
The Shopify store platform is designed to act fast, but multiple customizations and integrations can lead to an increased need for Shopify website loading speed improvement.
How to Speed up Shopify Store?
Looking for practical Shopify speed optimization tips? Continue reading the blog to find the top 8 useful and practical tips that can improve the core web vitals, user experience, search rankings, and ultimately the conversion rate.
1. Conduct a Performance Audit
Before changing configurations and introducing changes, you must understand which factors are contributing to the slow speed of your Shopify websites.
You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or Shopify’s built-in speed score to measure Shopify’s core web vitals. These include metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and First Input Delay (FID).
For example, if you have a Shopify website for organic food products. And after analyzing the core web vitals, you find that your LCP is 4.3 seconds, which is greater than the recommended LCP (According to Google’s guidelines, the recommended LCP for Shopify websites is 2.5 seconds or less). Then that’s the reason why your Shopify website is slow.
Note: It is always better to hire a Shopify expert to perform a complete performance audit for a Shopify store. With their vast experience and knowledge, they might be able to discover optimization issues that you might overlook.
2. Perform Image Optimization
On each Shopify store website, the major page weight is due to images. Many stores opt for image compression techniques to boost page loading speed. However, compressing images after uploading can result in poor-quality images, therefore opt for image compression before you upload them to your Shopify store.
Also, instead of using JPEG or PNG extension images, use the WebP format. Also, avoid uploading images that are greater than or equal to 4000px.
3. Audit installed applications
Shopify store owners often install apps for marketing, personalization, analytics, reviews, etc. But each app often integrates CSS and JavaScript into your store code.
Thus, to improve Shopify store performance, perform an audit of the installed applications on your storefront:
- Remove the applications that you do not use.
- Delete heavy applications and install their lightweight versions.
- Also, find and delete the scripts that may still be present even after you uninstall or delete the application.
4. Use Lightweight Shopify Themes
Premium themes with attractive visuals and stunning animations look good, but most often, they kill the Shopify website performance. On the other side, minimal and clean themes are fast-loading and do not derail the performance.
You can choose the Shopify default themes like Dawn, Electro, Booster, etc., that are among the most used themes by Shopify store owners.
5. Adopt Mobile responsiveness
Many Shopify store owners still adopt a desktop-first approach. But as discussed previously, the majority of customers today use mobile devices to access and purchase from Shopify stores online.
- Ensure your Shopify website is designed with small mobile hero banners.
- Use lightweight fonts that are easy to load on mobile devices as well.
- Make use of simplified navigation and layouts.
- Animations do look great, but on mobile devices, clean themes with minimal designs work well.
6. Implement Lazy Loading
Lazy loading can be a useful technique for improving the speed of your Shopify store. It ensures that the images load only when the user scrolls down to reach them.
When used for high-resolution product images, lazy loading can reduce the total page weight by a significant percentage, thus improving the overall speed of the Shopify page.
7. Work on Improving the Checkout Experience
The whole point of a Shopify store is to encourage customers to make a transaction. But if the checkout experience is slow, non-responsive, and filled with too many promotional offers, delaying the checkout page loading time, it can result in customers leaving without completing the payment. This can further lead to abandoned Shopify carts and a decrease in conversion rate.
Therefore, focus on:
- Removing unnecessary checkout applications that are only occupying space.
- Eliminate auto-loading of discounts and promotional offers.
- Ensure that payment gateways are integrated seamlessly, so that the customers do not face any delay in completing their shopping journey.
8. Make Use of GTM
A Google Tag Manager (GTM) can help in centralizing tag management and prevent render-blocking by loading scripts asynchronously. This can help reduce the need for multiple hardcoded scripts in the theme files.
- The GTM bundles all tracking scripts, including Google Analytics and Google Ads conversion tracking, etc, into a single container snippet. This leads to a decrease in the HTTP requests a browser needs to make at the time of loading a page.
- All the tracking scripts run in the background without hindering the website content or blocking the main page.
- With advanced optimization, GTM also supports server-side tagging, which can significantly reduce the client-side load, resulting in fast website loading and improved performance.
What are the Common Mistakes That Hurt Shopify Store Speed Optimization?
While the above tips can help you optimize your Shopify store’s speed and overall performance, there are certain mistakes that you must take care of:
-
Integrating Multiple Marketing Pop-ups
It’s true that pop-ups can drive signups and conversions, but too many pop-ups on one Shopify store can drastically impact the loading speed. Some of the common pop-ups that take time to load and decrease the website’s speed include:
➔ A spin-the-wheel pop-up
➔ Chat widgets
➔ Discount codes
➔ Social proof notifications, etc.
When scripts of multiple pop-ups load simultaneously, they delay the page rendering and the interaction speed.
-
Video Backgrounds on All Pages
Video backgrounds are an effective way to engage customers on the homepage or a specific landing page. But if integrated across all the Shopify website pages, they can increase the page weight and ultimately lead to slow loading Shopify website.
But if you still want to integrate videos with every page on your Shopify store, make sure to compress the videos heavily but not impact the quality. Also, if possible, remove the auto-play option; this can help decrease the loading time for video-integrated pages.
-
Not Performing Mobile Testing
You might have created a responsive Shopify store website, but before you launch, test its functionality across mobile devices.
There might be several issues that you may not discover until you actually test it, such as:
➔ Large banners for product names or categories might be taking too long to load.
➔ Pop-ups might cover the entire mobile screen.
➔ Buttons placing might require an adjustment, etc.
Note: Mobile users today demand fast response, and a slight delay can result in quitting your Shopify platform and switching to another one that feels well optimized. So, when partnering with a shopify website design company, make sure to test the website functionality across desktop and mobile devices efficiently.
Final Thoughts
Speed is a competitive factor for determining the success of a Shopify store website. With heavy competition in the online retail market, as a Shopify store owner, you cannot afford to lose customers because of slow loading pages, heavy integrated applications, or an unresponsive website design across different devices.
Therefore, treat speed optimization as an integral part of your Shopify website development process. Because performance does not demand a one-day fix, it’s an ongoing process that needs evaluation from time to time.
Want to build a high-performing Shopify website with optimzed speed and performance? Contact IceCube Digital, our team of experts can help you design a Shopify website that complements scalability, user experience, and revenue, while ensuring no comprises with the Shopify store speed.
