How to Speed up your Shopify Website

In a world where everyone is in a hurry to get what they need, the rulebook for success includes one unchanging rule: never keep your customers waiting. If you run an online store, your website’s loading speed will determine your ability to deliver on this end. So, one can’t stress enough the importance of optimising your Shopify website’s speed in this competitive market. Whether you’re just starting or have already launched your store, speed optimisation must remain a top priority at every stage of your online journey.

As web design experts in Melbourne, we prioritise website speed as much as your customers do and help businesses develop websites that are designed to succeed. To bring you up to speed and help you take your online store down the right lane, here’s a comprehensive guide to speed up your Shopify website. But before we get started, let’s have a closer look at why speed matters so much within the digital space.

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Why Does Speed Matter?

Think about it – if you visit a website and it takes too long to load, wouldn’t you skip it immediately?

Let’s have a look at some stats –

• As per Google, 53% of mobile users abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
• Also, the bounce rate jumps from 9% to 38% the moment the load time increases from 2 seconds to 5 seconds.

Do you see how much a mere 3-second difference can dissuade your potential customers from investing in your business? This is primarily why speed matters and why you need to speed up your Shopify website.

To better understand this, let’s have a closer look at the reasons why you should prioritise your Shopify website speed optimisation –

• Slow-loading pages significantly bring down user engagement and lead to cart abandonment. The quicker your customers can get the initial click to the final payment, the more likely they are to complete the purchase.
• Page speed is a key ranking factor for search engines. Faster websites rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
• A fast-loading website is better qualified to handle peak traffic without any disruptions.
• Faster websites typically use resources more efficiently, potentially reducing bandwidth usage and hosting costs.

Wondering how to speed up your Shopify website? Let us guide you through.

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How to Speed Up Your Shopify Website: Comprehensive Guide

Optimise Your Images

More often than not, a slow-loading web page is a result of website weight, i.e., the total size of all the resources (images, scripts, videos) that need to load when a user visits your website. So, if you wish to cut down on the loading time, you must keep your website weight to the minimum. While there are certain design and development measures that you could implement to achieve this end, one easy and effective way is optimising your images. Images typically account for 50-60% of a website’s total weight, so optimising them can help you significantly improve your page speed.

Here are a few ways to optimise your images –

• Use any image resizer to compress your images without reducing their quality. Tools like TinyPNG, ImageOptim, and Kraken.io are some recommended options.
• Resize your images to fit the exact requirements and avoid uploading oversized files.
• Choose the right image format – JPEG for photographs, PNG for graphics with fewer colours.

Use a Fast and Responsive Theme

Shopify offers a plethora of theme options to all users. While you should choose a theme that best suits your brand, you must also consider one that is lightweight and speed-optimised. There are certain themes like Debut, Dawn and many more that Shopify recommends for performance.

With the increasing shift towards minimalism, choosing a minimal theme will not only help you speed up your website but also ensure your website is up-to-date with the latest trends. So, cut down on all the unnecessary features or excessive animations and choose a theme that is fast and minimal. Also, make sure to consider the responsiveness of the theme you are choosing. If your chosen theme is not mobile-friendly, it could increase the loading time for mobile users on your website.

Limit the Use of Apps

Including apps in your Shopify website can help enhance its functionality but might slow down your website. So, only include those apps that are necessary and remove the rest.

What you can do is –

• Conduct a routine audit once in a while to find apps that might no longer be in use and remove them.
• Look for hidden scripts and edit them out. Even after removing some apps, they might leave behind scripts or code that continues to run in the background, increasing your page weight and slowing down your apps.
• Choose performance-optimised apps that are lightweight, fast and offer multiple functionalities in one. You can read customer reviews and make an efficient pick.

Enable Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a proven website performance optimisation technique. It delays the loading of non-essential elements (ones that are not immediately visible) of a page until they are actually needed. For instance, when you open a web page, only a part of the page will be visible at first, and lazy loading will load only that particular part and leave the rest. Only when you scroll down would the rest of the page, including images, videos, and other multimedia, load. This technique could help you reduce your initial load time and bandwidth usage and help you better optimise your website for mobile devices.

Minify CSS and JavaScript

Another effective way to increase your page speed and overall website performance is minification. It refers to the process of removing all unnecessary characters like line breaks, white spaces and comments from your code files. This will help you reduce your file size, making your CSS and JavaScript files smaller and faster to load.

You can also combine your CSS and JavaScript files into one. It can help you reduce the amount of HTTPS requests sent to the server when a search is made, cutting down load times and improving page speed.

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Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network distributes your content across multiple servers. Whenever someone clicks on your website link, it will deliver content more quickly to users by serving it from a server that is geographically closer to them. Thus reducing the load time. Shopify has a built-in global CDN, which is automatically activated when you launch a website on Shopify.
But to derive the optimum benefits out of Shopify’s CDN, you must –

• Upload all your images and files directly to Shopify.
• Use native Shopify themes and features as they are designed to work with the CDN and avoid external files.
• Avoid using external scripts.

Reduce Redirects

While redirects are necessary, excessive redirects can negatively impact your page speed. Each redirect generates an HTTP request, therefore increasing the response and load time.

Here are some ways to reduce redirects –

• Avoid redirect chains – This can occur if you update URLs multiple times without cleaning up older redirects.
• Find and eliminate broken links using tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog.
• Use direct URLs that lead to the final destination and remove outdated ones.

Leverage Browser Caching

Browser caching allows a website visitor’s browser to store certain elements of your website locally on their device. That way, when someone revisits your website, the browser can load these elements from the local cache without having to download them again from the server, significantly reducing load times for returning visitors. All kinds of static resources like images, CSS stylesheets, JavaScript files, fonts and HTML documents can be cached. Shopify has built-in caching, but to make the best use of this feature, optimise your images and use cache-friendly URLs.

Avoid Excessive Pop-Ups and Integrations

We all want to make our websites as interactive as possible. However, too many pop-ups will not just disturb your visitors but also reduce your page speed, bringing down user experience and increasing bounce rate. Even if you decide to add a few pop-ups, time them right and use lightweight pop-up tools.

Other than pop-ups, adding too many third-party integrations can also slow down your website. Conduct an audit and uninstall any unused or redundant Shopify apps. Also, third-party plugins should be replaced with native features wherever possible.

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Regularly Test Your Site Speed

Optimising your website speed once is not enough; you have to monitor it regularly and make the necessary changes. To test your Shopify website’s speed, you can use several tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix or Pingdom Website Speed Test. All these tools will not just help you track your website’s speed but also provide you with specific insights and recommendations. Make sure to utilise the most effective speed-tracking tools available in the market and use them to speed up your website.

Build a Fast and Flawless Shopify Website with Us at MMW

The world is moving forward faster than ever, and anything that lags is quickly forgotten. To keep your online store relevant, you must match this pace. Our web design and SEO experts are here to help you with this. With us, you design, develop and launch a superfast website. As industry professionals, we are well aware of the factors that impact your website’s speed and consider them all during your web development process. From the initial design stage to the eventual launch, expect us to adopt all speed-friendly elements and optimise your website for better performance. If you already have a Shopify website and need help with speed optimisation, you can connect with us, and our team will be happy to help.