Website's response time is very crucial for eCommerce success. Pagespeed is an important business metric. Pagespeed can make or break sales, and turn away visitors quickly. According to wpengine, speed is a key factor for mobile websites. Customers on different devices can enjoy the same speed, despite the differences.
Slow-loading websites can lead to high bounce rates, lower user engagement, less traffic and a variety of sales impacts. You can improve Shopify SEO and user experience (UX) by improving site speed. You can also improve your search engine rankings.
What is page speed?
Page speed, in short, is the rate at which your webpage loads. It begins at the moment your browser receives a single byte from the webserver and ends when the page's content is displayed fully.
Shopify Page Speed Optimization Checklist
User experience is greatly affected by the speed at which your page loads. Slow loading websites can lead to users abandoning the page, which will dramatically increase bounce rates and ultimately, impact your conversions.
A fast loading page is preferable to a complicated page with lots of content. Hubspot estimates that a 1 second delay in loading a page will result in a 7% decrease in conversions and 11% less page views. Speed and hosting improvements can increase your sales by up to 60%, compared to what is happening right now.
1. Track the Page Speed
If you're interested in Shopify page speed Optimization, here are some trusted and simple tools that can help you do so. If your page speed results are green, you're good to go.
- Google Page Speed Insight: This tool measures page performance and assigns a Page Speed Score. It evaluates how pages perform on mobile and desktop devices. The Page Speed Score ranges from 0-100 to 85+, and then suggests ways to speed up your page. You can also install the extension from Chrome (link), and you can check the page's speed without visiting the site.
- WebPage Test: This open-source tool runs speed tests from multiple locations around the globe, with different consumer connection speeds. It provides rich insights such as resource loading waterfall charts, page optimization checks and suggestions for improvement.
- Google Analytics: The Site Speed Reports in Google Analytics provide insight into the speed with which users can see and interact content. They also show what the drop-off points were.
- Chrome DevTools: Chrome DevTools is a flexible real-time tool that allows you to evaluate the performance of your website right from your browser. You can simulate network speeds and load details, analyze network loading details, and examine how your code impacts your page.
- Mobile-Friendly Testing: This tool is specifically designed for mobile sites and analyzes how mobile-friendly the site really is. It also focuses on other elements than speed.
2. Increase Website Speed and Reduce Load Time
Pre-built templates are used to design web pages. Themes usually refer to themes. You can choose the theme you prefer for your Shopify store to affect its loading speed.
Shopify themes give your online store a simple layout that you can customize to your liking. The Shopify themes' skeletal framework is mainly composed of Liquid Codes like JavaScript or CSS. This allows for customization. This means that later, the load speed performance of Shopify sites will be affected by the addition of content, Shopify Apps, and plugins.
- Optimize Image Loading Time: Images are often the best non-verbal way for online merchants and customers to interact with them directly. However, too many images or large-sized photos can slow down Shopify's speed and cause your visitors to lose more bandwidth.Images should be added to pages to add weight. Poor image optimization can put off buyers who are ready to buy and could prevent you from being ranked top in search engines. You must ensure that all images on Shopify are optimized and compressed to ensure you use the correct image format. Many image compression tools are available that will allow you to reduce the size of your images without compromising on their quality.
- Optimize web fonts: Shopify's Font Library is ideal because it houses hundreds of fonts. These fonts can be either system fonts or licensed alternatives. Shopify's fonts play an important role in website design. We tend to concentrate more on the type, variants, family, style, and style of the fonts we choose to use. Unfortunately, this focus on pleasing readers can often distract from the idea of its performance costs.Whatever your preference, all fonts are weighted. Choosing the wrong font could dramatically slow down your site’s loading speed. When you use third-party fonts, which must be downloaded first, this is a common problem.
3. Optimize front-end code
Shopify's front-end code is a combination of several programming languages such as JavaScript and CSS to provide a direct and successful end-user interaction. Optimizing front-end codes is about making sure your content is easily read and in a pleasing format that loads quickly even on mobile devices.
Performance implications are the only problem with adding code resources, such as scripts or apps, to your code base. We recommend migrating your front-end code to Google Tag Manager in order to optimize it and reduce loading times without sacrificing functionality.
4. Optimize back-end code
- Reduce HTTP requests: When different pages (images and stylesheets or scripts) are being downloaded, an HTTP request is made. The longer it takes for the page (aka to render) to "read" the script, the more elements and styles on the page. To reduce the number of requests, you need to first determine how many your site uses.Google Chrome browser users can access the Developer Tools to view how many HTTP requests their site receives.
- Use a CDN: To reduce load times for your website visitors, you can use other servers than the Shopify server. A Content Delivery Network (CDN) allows you to cache your site on a worldwide network of servers. A visitor's browser cache requests files from your website (loading a page, an image, or any other data), and it routes that request to the nearest server.
5. Redirects should be reduced
Redirects are designed to improve user experience by redirecting visitors to a more relevant page, away from broken or dead links. Each redirect can lead to page loading delays and increased latency.
The webserver will make additional requests before the browser fetches the redirected page. Other round trips can lead to longer load times. Similar to broken links, redundant redirects in Shopify stores can slow down your page speed.
You should only create redirects for dead pages in order to minimize redirects and broken link. Register to scan your Shopify store with the Google Webmaster tool to identify broken links. The URL Redirect function can be used in your store admin panel for creating working redirects.
6. PageFly - Get faster speeds
Shopify speed optimization is a key factor that directly influences user experience, customer retention, and further determines conversions and sales. Shopify store owners often struggle with optimizing Shopify speed.
PageFly offers a unique one-click solution that solves all your loading speed issues.
PageFly is optimized to deliver fast-loading images and code consistently. It has a unique Lazy Load option that optimizes page loading speed. You can get faster Shopify speeds by activating the PageFly app now
Conclusion:
You can learn and practice optimizing your website's speed if you are new to the process. Although you might need to hire Shopify SEO Expert to speed up your website, you will likely make that money back very quickly.
Related Post:
Shopify On-page SEO To Boost Your Rankings : Detailed Guide
No comments yet