Shopify is a platform for businesses of all sizes to create an online store. It offers users a customizable platform, an easy-to-use checkout process, and many features. Shopify is an excellent choice for businesses that want to sell online, and businesses of all sizes can use it.
The loading speed of your Shopify eCommerce site is essential when creating or optimizing your store.
If the pages of your store are too slow to load, it can discourage visitors from coming to your site from staying. On average, the loading time of a web page must not exceed 3 seconds of loading; otherwise, you will start losing a large number of visitors.
In addition to the loss of visitors to your site, the site’s loading time is also considered by Google’s algorithm to determine your positioning in search results.
Between the potential loss of visitors and the impact on your site’s SEO, it is more than necessary that the loading speed of your Shopify store be as low as possible.
If you’re looking for ways to improve the speed of your Shopify store, you’ve come to the right place. This article will share tips and tricks to help you speed up your Shopify store.
Tips to Speed Up Shopify Site
Manage Shopify App
Every app you install on your Shopify store adds code that needs to be loaded, which can slow things down. Try to use only the apps that you need.
The application system on Shopify is an undeniable advantage in bringing many features to your store. However, there is a disadvantage: the more applications you have on your site, the more likely you will encounter problems in your store.
These problems can be numerous, such as new bugs from installed applications and potential security vulnerabilities, but also an increase in the loading time of your site if one or more applications are poorly optimized or have bugs.
If you notice that an application increases the speed of your store, try to determine if it comes from a specific feature of the application or the entire application. Depending on the result of the analysis, it is good practice to disable the affected feature or delete the whole application if the latter is involved.
Keep in mind that too many applications on your Shopify store can harm it, so it will be good for you and your store to find the best possible balance between the features essential to you and its speed.
Attention, sometimes, even after uninstalling a Shopify application from your store, they may leave some code in your store.
In this case, try to find the code of the uninstalled application to delete it by yourself. This manipulation requires caution because removing the wrong code can cause bugs in your store or make it inaccessible.
If you do not know to perform this manipulation, do not hesitate to contact with OrixLab. Our Expert Shopify developers can help you clean the remaining code of an application you have deleted.
Applications that provide features only on the administrator interface and not on your store itself will not affect the loading speed of your store.
It will therefore not be necessary to uninstall them to improve the speed of your store.
Choose well and optimize the Shopify theme.
One essential point in optimizing a Shopify store’s speed is its theme.
Indeed, the theme you choose will significantly impact the loading speed of your pages.
Many themes are available for Shopify, and some are better optimized for speed than others. Doing some research to find a fast theme can be worth the effort.
Before optimizing a theme, it is essential to choose a good theme that will meet the needs of your store in terms of aesthetics and functionality but also that will be designed in the best way so that it has the lowest weight and makes as few queries as possible.
The themes offered by Shopify will generally be good choices. However, if you want to opt for a theme from an independent developer or company, you must research it before choosing a theme.
Once you find a theme that suits you, you can test its optimization using the demo most themes offer. Website speed analysis sites such as GTMetrix will give you data on the optimization of the theme: its weight, number of requests, etc.
Choose a theme with low weight and several requests. In a more general case, you can use the score given by the GTMetrix, “A” being the best.
Then, when you have chosen, installed, and configured the theme on your Shopify store, you can optimize it by performing a few manipulations.
1. Disable unused features
First, if you have the opportunity, disable all the features provided with the theme you will not need.
2. Minify and compress resources
If you don’t know what file minification and compression are, these are two techniques that can save you a lot of loading speed on your store.
Without going into too much detail, minifying and compressing your CSS and JavaScript files will reduce their size by optimizing the code written in the files.
It is possible to perform these two actions manually, requiring advanced technical knowledge.
The easiest way is to install a file optimization application such as “Page Speed Optimizer: PI Speed” or “Hyperspeed: Extreme Page Speed” to optimize your website, including CSS and JavaScript files, by compressing and minimizing your website them.
3. Optimize images
The last piece of advice we will have to give you to optimize your theme and store, in general, will be to optimize the images on your store.
If you have a theme with images included by default, you have added images to your store, which is very likely in the latter case; you will need to optimize all these images.
The two main actions to optimize your images will be compressing them and reducing their dimensions. You can do this manually using software such as Photoshop or online through free sites such as Pixlr or ILoveImg.
No worries if you want to delegate this task to a Shopify application. There are several offerings you can use to optimize your site’s images. The two applications we proposed to you in the previous point, “Hyperspeed” and “PI Speed,” will accomplish this task.
However, if you want a specialized application dedicated solely to optimizing your images, you can turn to applications such as TinyIMG, Image Optimizer, or Crush. Pics – SEO Compression.
4. Reduce the number of items on pages
We are at the last point to improve the loading speed of your Shopify store. This last good practice to implement is to reduce the number of elements appearing on the pages of your website.
The most important thing will be to minimize the number of pop-ups on your Shopify site when someone accesses a page in your store.
In addition to increasing a page’s loading time, pop-ups significantly reduce the user experience. They block access to your site and can sometimes discourage visitors from continuing to browse your site.
An essential need must justify any pop-up added to your store; if a pop-up is not essential, you should delete it.
In a more general case, adding too many elements to a web page will take longer to load. In addition to pop-ups, you will have to minimize the items on the same page.
Take, for example, a collection page from your Shopify store; instead of displaying 50 default products, remember to display only 25 and offer a “See more” button.
This same logic can apply to the blog on your Shopify site, where you can display fewer articles by default.
5. Use a content delivery network (CDN)
A CDN can help improve your Shopify store’s speed by caching your content and delivering it to your visitors from a location closer to them.
We recommend using BunnyCDN. If you want to read the best CDN comparison, you can read the best CDN provider comparison blog.
Conclusion
Improving the speed of your store requires optimizing several elements of your store. Whether it is the theme, the applications, or the construction of your pages itself, you will need to put in place several best practices to see a change in the speed of your site.
The above tips should help you speed up your Shopify store significantly. If you still have speed issues, consider hiring a Shopify expert to help you further optimize your store.
If you need to be accompanied to optimize your store or want to go further, do not hesitate to contact OrixLab. We have a team of expert Shopify developers who can help you improve the speed of your Shopify store.
