Tips For Shopify Speed Optimization

Introduction

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that empowers businesses to create online stores easily. It’s user-friendly, allowing entrepreneurs to manage products, track orders, and customize their storefronts without advanced technical knowledge. However, as online competition grows, ensuring a speed up web flow site is crucial. Shopify speed optimization involves enhancing your site’s performance by minimizing page loading times.

From optimizing images to utilizing efficient coding practices, the goal is to create a seamless and fast shopping experience, fostering customer satisfaction and potentially increasing sales. Thus, this blog explains how to speed up the Shopify store using different techniques.

Techniques To Speed Up Shopify Store

Bored of unused Shopify apps:

While these apps are useful for adding features and improving your store’s look and performance, having too many can slow down your site. Specifically, customer-facing apps, which display information on your web pages, may impact speed. Keep the essential ones, but reconsider those that only add extras. Remove apps that don’t contribute value to your business and merely add unnecessary code to your website. Streamlining your apps ensures a faster, more efficient online store.

Select a fast-loading theme:

Choose a fast, responsive theme for your Shopify store carefully. Picking the right one is crucial because it significantly affects your site’s speed. Changing themes daily isn’t practical. Consider these points when selecting your theme:

Style and speed balance: Your theme should be fast and match your brand style. Look at demo stores for style and read reviews for speed. Ensure it works well on all devices.

Test your theme: Before finalizing, test it to meet your expectations, especially for paid themes. Shopify allows testing before purchase.

Free themes: Shopify offers free themes with Online Store 2.0 capabilities. Dawn, focusing on speed, is one such theme.

Install the latest version: Ensure your hired designer installs the latest, licensed version, avoiding outdated or pirated copies.

Theme upgrades: Regularly check the developer’s change log and upgrade when major updates are released.

Optimize Shopify store images:

Improve your Shopify store speed by optimizing images. This is crucial for faster site performance and is an easy task. While attractive images enhance content, they can slow down your Shopify site. Shopify has a speed limit, allowing only 25 sections on your homepage and 50 products on collection pages.

To prevent sluggish loading, consider:

• Use lower-resolution images for a balance between quality and speed.
• Enable lazy-loading to load images when visitors scroll.
• Optimize images for different devices, especially mobile.
• Be selective with high-res photos; showcase products effectively.

Fix broken links:

Fix broken links to speed up your Shopify store. If an internal link doesn’t work, it slows down your site. Agencies like MakkPress Technologies can help find broken links. Redirect them using Shopify’s 301 redirects guide. This takes effort but prevents customer frustration with 404 errors or slow loading.

Use static images:

Switch out moving pictures for still ones on your Shopify store. Animated GIFs can enhance the look, but they also make your page much bigger. When it comes to designing websites, you need to find a middle ground between making your brand stand out and ensuring users have a smooth experience. Animated GIFs can be useful, but if you want your page to load faster, consider taking some of them out. It’s about finding the right balance for your site, keeping things visually appealing without slowing down the user’s experience.

Priotize above the fold content:

To improve your Shopify website’s performance, prioritize the content visible at the top of the page, known as above-the-fold content. It’s essential that this content loads quickly, as potential customers are more likely to leave if they experience delays. Moreover, the loading speed of your website also affects its SEO rankings. To speed up your Shopify site, consider implementing the following strategies: enable lazy loading for content below the fold, use Shopify’s fonts instead of external ones with additional code, incorporate relevant videos below the fold for a seamless scrolling experience, replace GIFs with static images, and compress image sizes. Additionally, limit animations in both site pages and headers for Shopify speed optimization.

Limit the use of pop-ups:

While they can boost leads, they annoy many shoppers. Pop-ups may also slow your Shopify page if they contain images or extra elements like a countdown timer. We are not suggesting you eliminate all pop-ups. Instead, use a pop-up teaser to enhance your Shopify site’s speed.

Enable quick view on category pages:

To enable a quick view on category pages, you can have pop-ups that show a product directly on the listings page, avoiding the need to visit a separate product detail page. However, this feature may have drawbacks. It adds an extra step to the customer’s journey, can be clicked accidentally, might be mistaken for a product page, and can slow down page loading time. Quick-view pop-ups may preload a lot of data, impacting performance. Using click mapping can help assess user engagement. To disable this function, check your theme customizer or app settings.

Fix the browser for faster loading:

To speed up the Shopify store, make sure the browser isn’t slowed down by certain scripts. When a webpage is shown to someone, the browser has to follow steps, and sometimes scripts can interrupt this process. You can easily fix this by adding a simple code called “async” or “defer” to those scripts. It’s like telling the browser, “Hey, you can keep doing your thing, and when you’re ready, run these scripts.” After you make these changes, just check that your website still works the way you want it to. It’s a quick adjustment to improve how fast your site shows up for visitors.

Optimize server:

Optimizing your server is crucial for a smooth online experience. The distance between your physical server and users impacts the time it takes for HTTP requests. When choosing hosting, consider your business focus. If you sell globally, a CDN connection is wise. If you’re new to Shopify, server tuning isn’t your worry. Shopify manages hosting quality without extra fees. Upgrade your hosting plan to enhance your store, potentially cutting loading times in half. Server optimization becomes hassle-free, allowing you to focus on growing your online business seamlessly.

Mobile optimization:

To enhance your Shopify store’s performance on mobile devices, focus on optimizing for faster loading and a better user experience. If your shop isn’t mobile-friendly, users might face slow loading times and a poor experience. Two key strategies for improvement are responsive design and image optimization. With responsive design, ensure your shop layout adjusts well to various screen sizes for optimal mobile viewing. Use CSS media queries to tweak layout, font sizes, and content organization for smaller screens. Additionally, optimize images by compressing them with tools like TinyPNG, reducing file sizes without compromising quality. Implement responsive images in HTML to cater to different device resolutions.

Conclusion

Therefore, in this Shopify speed optimization blog, we have explained the techniques you can utilize to speed up your Shopify site. You can enhance your store performance and loading speed by implementing the mentioned strategies.

Also, use website performance optimization tool like Website Speedy, a SaaS-based tool that helps websites boost their loading speed. Website Speedy creates a script that you have to enter on your site, and watch out for the performance upgrade.