When it comes to online selling, Shopify is considered the best platform.
With Shopify, you can create a fully functional, appealing eCommerce store for your business.
However, just having an eCommerce website is not enough. You need to make sure people visiting your website get the best experience.
The main issue users often come across when visiting any website is poor loading speed.
Web users don’t have patience. If the website takes too long to load, visitors are likely to bounce and switch to a competitor’s website.
Here’s everything you need to know about improving the Shopify website’s loading speed.
Reasons Why Shopify Store’s Speed Matters
Before showing you how you can speed up your Shopify store, let’s first talk about the reasons why loading speed matters.
Better user experience
Imagine visiting a website that takes so long to load. Would you visit that website again? The chances are you might bounce back if the website doesn’t load in a few seconds.
Improves sales and conversions
Do you know a one-second delay leads to a 7% reduction in conversion? Hence, a slow-loading website won’t just ruin the user experience, it will impact conversions as well. This becomes more important for an eCommerce website. Ideally, an eCommerce website should load within 2 seconds.
SEO rankings
The time it takes to load your website has an impact on search rankings. Giant search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. prioritize websites that deliver the best user experience. As website loading speed is linked with user experience, a slow-loading website also means declined SEO rankings.
Improve dwell time, reduce bounce rate
Website speed optimization is also necessary to increase average session duration and decrease bounce rate. When web pages load faster, users are going to spend more time exploring different products.
9 Ways To Make Your Shopify Store Load Faster
Here’s how you can make your Shopify store load faster:
- Use compressed images
- Use AMP
- Use a fast and responsive Shopify theme
- Remove unused apps
- Reduce HTTP requests
- Use Hero layout rather than sliders
- Reduce redirects and broken links
- Use a system font
- Hire a Shopify expert
Use compressed images
Adding compressed images can improve your website’s loading speed significantly. Large image size increases load time, resulting in a slow-loading website. The purpose of image compression is to reduce image file (it could be PNG, JPG, JPEG, or GIF) size without losing quality. There are so many free tools on the web for image compression.
Use AMP
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a framework used to make web pages on mobile devices load at a lightning speed. Mobile accounts for about 65% of all eCommerce traffic. What does it mean? If your online store takes too long to load on mobile devices, you will be missing out on a significant amount of traffic. To generate AMP pages on Shopify, you can use apps like FireAMP or RocketAMP.
Use a fast and responsive Shopify theme
The chances are your Shopify theme might be slowing down your website. Some fastest Shopify themes are Booster, Shoptimized, Plak, and Debut. Before using a particular theme on your Shopify store, check its live preview and run the Google PageSpeed test or GTmetrix test.
Remove unused apps
Apps on Shopify provide you with a way to add features and functionality to your store. But, they can increase page loading speed when you have too many apps installed. So, remove all the apps that are not in use.
Reduce HTTP requests
Too many HTTP requests can be the possible reason why your website takes too long to load. Issues in CSS and JavaScript can make too many HTTP requests. To check it, use a tool like GiftOfSpeed. Optimize CSS & JS code and you are good to go.
Use a hero layout instead of sliders
Using sliders means adding around 4-5 high-quality images to the website. Guess what? It increases the load time. That’s why we advise using a hero image rather than adding multiple sliders.
Reduce redirects and broken links
When you find any broken link, you can redirect it to the relevant one. However, the problem is, it increases the load time. A redirect is when you visit a URL that redirects you to another URL. It adds to the actual speed of the web page and results in poor loading speed.
Use a system font
Fonts play a crucial role in UI (user interface) design. You might be using Google Web Fonts to make your website stand out, but the problem is it makes too many HTTP requests. As a result, the website loads slowly. To avoid this issue, use web-safe fonts. Web-safe fonts are the fonts included with most operating systems. Using fonts already downloaded on users’ systems would prevent HTTP requests and make your Shopify store load faster.
Hire a Shopify expert
If you don’t want to get into the technical stuff of web page speed optimization, consider hiring a Shopify expert. Depending on your requirements, a Shopify expert can help you with speed optimization, theme customization, etc.
At Encircle Technologies, we have a team of skilled Shopify developers. With skills and experience, our team can make your slow eCommerce store load at lightning speed.
Interested? Contact us at support@encircletechnologies.com
Also Read: What is Shopify 2.0? What Are Its Features?
