Imagine you’re searching for a particular product online. You click on the second website in the search results. But it’s taking too long to load the contents. What do you do? You skip that website and visit another Shopify store.
Your customers also follow the same trait while shopping online. Therefore, you need to ensure your website loads as quickly as possible.
Today, we’ll present ten tips to boost your Shopify store speeds. You can hire Shopify experts to improve your overall store performance.
10 Tips To Improve The Speed of Your Shopify Store
Select A Responsive And Fast Theme
The main cause of slow site speed is the site theme. You need to choose a theme that is quick and loads quickly.
An optimized theme will consolidate
- all styles into a single CSS file and
- all javascript into a single javascript file.
Before finalizing a theme, test the theme using Google PageSpeed Insight and review the outcomes.
Once you are happy with how it looks and functions, you can implement it on your Shopify website.
However, ensure that your theme is regularly updated to the newest version. Connect with Shopify experts. They can help you use the best Shopify themes designed for speed and performance.
Utilize A Hero Design
Modern websites uses a hero layout. In this layout you can place a prominent banner image that closely resonates with your service. Usually, Shopify experts recommend placing this image at the top and center of your homepage.
So when the website visitors land on your page, they’ll see the hero image as the initial visual component. When you hire Shopify developers, they help optimize the visual experience of your website visitors through captivating hero images and interactive elements.
Using a still hero image is one of the most prevalent practices. It is ideal for healthcare and educational institutions offering niche services.
But here’s where things get interesting. To make things more appealing, consider using multiple image sliders. This can be especially beneficial when you’re offering more than one product or service.
Apart from the image, your hero design should also involve a persuasive headline that clearly highlights what your business is about. You’ll also need to include a short business introduction and a relevant CTA.
Some businesses also insert a contact form within the hero section to capture leads more efficiently.
Get Rid Of Shopify Apps That Are Not Needed.
Using a multitude of apps will automatically include CSS or JavaScript files in your store.
This results in significant performance issues for your website. If the app remains inactive, the CSS and/or JavaScript files will still be active. This can cause a decrease in your Shopify store’s performance.
Hence, it’s a good practice to:
- regularly review your Shopify store for unused apps and
- remove them.
While any app is still installed, it will keep running its CSS and/or JavaScript files. Therefore, ensure that you use only the best Shopify apps.
Boost Mobile Performance With Accelerated Mobile Pages (Amp).
AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is a standardized open framework. It is created for publishers to develop fast loading web pages for mobile devices.
Today, more than 50% of shoppers use their mobile phones for making purchases. More than 65% of individuals except a Shopify mobile store to load in 4 seconds or less.
Therefore, your shop needs to be mobile-friendly. Users won’t wait for a store that takes 10 seconds to load. They are likely to move on to a different store that offers them prompt service.
Research has indicated that individuals prefer reading AMP content than traditional web content. The more time a person spends in your store, the greater the chance they will make a purchase as well.
You can install Shopify’s AMP apps to easily create and implement AMP pages on your website. Conversely, you can also hire Shopify App Development Services to create an app.
Optimize Your Website Images
The fundamental cause of slow page load speeds is the visual elements. Having big images and videos can drastically decrease the speed of your website.
Heavy images will cause your total page size to be larger. Consequently, it’ll slow down your page load speed.
- Shopify Experts suggests utilizing product photos that are 2048×2048 pixels in size. Therefore, if your images exceed that size, it is advisable to resize them and decrease their dimensions. You can accomplish that by utilizing the Shopify Image Resizer tool.
- Pictures that are oversized should be compressed as well. This will help decrease the file size without affecting the image quality.
Organize Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager offer several features that helps to improve the performance of your website. However if your GTM isn’t optimized it might slow down your website.
If you want to improve website speed with Google Tag Manager the first thing to consider is reducing the number of tags. Why? Each tag you add to your Shopify store comes with its own code and resources. Ad increased code can translate into increased page load times.
Here are a few ways to reduce the number of tags you use on your Shopify store:
- Audit: This most important step. If you’re not well-customed on how GTM works you can hire Shopify store management services. They’ll have the expertise to conduct an in-depth audit of your GTM container.
- Remove: Once you’re done with the audit make a list of the tags that not relevant of your website or seems redundant.
- Combine: You might find certain tags that aren’t redundant but serve similar purpose. In such cases, consider consolidating or combining them into a single tag. This’ll significantly reduce the number of network requests.
Reduce HTTP Requests
The HTTP Requests Checker tool can help decrease the amount of HTTP requests made. You can minimize the amount of HTTP requests by implementing the measures listed below:
- Integrate your CSS scripts directly into your HTML code.
- Utilize inline JavaScript for shorter code snippets.
- Merge all JavaScript files.
- Reduce the reliance on functional design images.
- Transform pictures into Base64 encoding.
- Restrict the quantity of social media buttons.
You can work with a third-party integration as a checker tool.
Regular Performance Analysis
Regularly checking your website’s performance is a wise practice to maintain. You can understand when your website’s speed is impacted and the reasons behind it.
Before making any Shopify performance improvements, it is essential to conduct this analysis to determine the necessary optimizations.
You can use tools such as
- Google PageSpeed Insights,
- GTMetrix, and
- Pingdom
These tools help assess your website’s performance. Shopify Store Management Services can pinpoint areas that could be enhanced.
Reduce Url Redirects
Too many redirects may cause
- performance problems and
- high load times in your Shopify store.
To check all the URL redirects on your Shopify store, you can go to ‘Online Store’> ‘Navigation’ from your Shopify admin panel.
Now click on ‘URL Redirects’ to display most of your Shopify store’s active redirects. From here you can check and reduce your URL redirects.
This can help your Shopify App Development Services to improve the speed and performance of your Shopify store.
Remove Broken Links
Having broken links on your store can be detrimental. Broken links cause an increase in the amount of redundant HTTP requests that need to be made.
This slows down the loading time of your Shopify site. This will result in increased loading times for the page.
The Broken Link Checker tool can help you find and fix broken links on your website.
You can use this tool for free. It also offers a ‘src’ link. This link indicates the exact location of the broken link in the page’s code.
Wrapping up
Hire Shopify developers. They can help you improve the speed and performance of your Shopify store.
