Tips to speed up the Shopify website
The key factors to succeed in the e-commerce world are search engine optimization, fast page speed, and site performance.
As the number of users access the sites or buy products using smartphones and they expect sites to load as soon as they click on a hyperlink. Slow loading web pages can result in a high bounce rate, low user engagement, less traffic, and hence the adverse effect on your sales.
If you are running a Shopify E-Commerce website, the below-mentioned tips can increase the site’s loading speed.
1) Performance Analysis
There are certain ways to analyze your site using tools.
Analyzes the Mobile and Desktop Performance with PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights tool by Google generates PageSpeed score and PageSpeed suggestions for the web pages to make the website faster. The tool displays the critical elements for mobile and desktop separately like:
- Optimize images.
- Minify CSS.
- Minify JavaScript.
- Removes render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content.
- Leverage browser caching and Reduce server response time.
- Avoid landing page redirects.
- Gzip compression.
Mobile Page Speed Report
Desktop Page Speed Report
Google also suggests running the site through the Test My Site tool, where you can analyze both mobile friendliness and mobile page speed. Move over to Test My Site to try it.
Enter your website URL and Google will scan the site and will take a few minutes to evaluate. You can generate a free report by clicking on the “GET MY FREE” button and entering the email address for detailed results.
Website Speed and Performance Optimization with Gtmetrix
GTmetrix is a free tool that is used to analyze the page speed performance and grade the web pages from A to F and provides suggestions to tackle. Use Gtmetrix by clicking on the “waterfall” tab, the exact amount of time each request took to fulfill.
Monitor a Website’s Speed and Performance with Pingdom
Pingdom tests the load speed of your website FREE and gives recommendations on how to make a website faster.
2) Make Your Page Lightning Fast with AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages — or AMP is an open standard framework designed for any publisher to create fast-loading web pages on mobile devices.
More than 50% of shoppers buy from mobile devices, so it becomes highly important to make your website mobile-ready and loads quickly. Hence, with AMP (Mobile Accelerated Pages) technology users can access the website quickly on mobile devices. In Shopify, generate AMP pages for your site quickly and efficiently with FireAMP or RocketAmp Apps.
3) Compressing Images
Shopify allows you to add the following image formats:
- JPEG or JPG
- Progressive JPEG
- PNG
- GIF
Image compression is necessary for faster loading web pages. While doing image optimization, the images must be of an acceptable size, and adding too many images on a single page must be avoided.
For new images, use tinypng.com or tinyjpg.com for free to reduce the size of your images. You can see the below image; This tool just saved me 71% and 286 KB total.
Once all the images are replaced with the optimized versions, the page load time will automatically improve.
4) Download a Fast and Responsive Theme for Your Shopify Store
The site’s loading speed mainly depends on the site theme, so before you install a theme it is always suggested to check the following:
- Search for a fast and responsive theme.
- Look for an up-to-date copy of your theme and check the live preview of the theme.
- Once the theme has been chosen, remember to keep it up to date.
5) Reduce the Number of Apps Installed
The majority of apps downloaded through Shopify add some Script/CSS files to your store. The main problem with not using the app, the JavaScript/CSS files are running in the background, and make your site performance slower.
So, that is why you should go through your store and check any apps that you are not using and remove them. There might be some apps you just tried out and forget to delete.
6) Reduce the HTTP Requests
Use HTTP Requests Checker the tool by GiftOfSpeed to find out how many total HTTPS requests your page makes. You can reduce HTTP requests by doing the following:
- Combine & inline your CSS scripts
- Inline smaller JavaScript
- Combine all JavaScript
- Reduce the use of design & functional images
- CSS image sprites
- Convert images to Base64 code
- Limit the number of social buttons
7) Minimize Redirects and Broken Links
The performance issue may occur because of many redirects and broken links. The easiest way to minimize the number of Redirects and Broken Links. Avoid unnecessary Redirects and fix broken links.
For redirects
Unessential redirects create performance and speed issues, and this can could put impact the overall load time of the website. In Shopify, 301 redirects can be applied used by the built-in redirects function called “URL redirect.”
For Broken links
Broken links on a website can be harmful, which increases unnecessary HTTP requests and gives a bad user experience. To find and fix broken links across the website, use free tools like Broken Link Checker and Xenu.
8) Organize All Your Tracking Code with Google Tag Manager
Add separate tracking codes for Google Analytics, AdWords conversions, goals, remarketing tags, etc., on your end or send it to the developer; this process takes time but eventually slows down the overall site performance. With the help of Google Tag Manager, your tags are stored in a single place.
Use the Google Tag Manager with your Shopify store.
9) Use Hero Layout Instead of Using Sliders
Sliders have been popular, and people add 5-6 high-quality images to the slider, increasing the overall load time of the website. Research has shown it’s time to ignore them completely.
Another rather important point on acceleration is optimization and compression of images on the site. You may manually optimize each picture (through Photoshop for example), or automatically (through special services). Here is an interesting article about it: https://optipic.io/en/blog/how-and-why-to-optimize-iamges-on-the-site/