Do you think your Shopify store could be faster? If the answer is yes, you might need to optimise your website's loading speed.
A recent survey found that 40% of shoppers will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That stat alone should highlight how vital speed is to eCommerce success.
Speed can also directly impact your conversion rate and profits if your site visitors get so frustrated by a slow-loading page that they take their business elsewhere.
In this blog post, we’ll cover five tips on how to optimise your Shopify store for speed without spending a fortune on a performance team or an expensive hosting company.
1. Reduce the Number of Shopify Apps Installed
Some store owners go all out for performance while setting up their store and install many unnecessary apps on their Shopify website, ultimately slowing it down.
While it’s true that Shopify’s App Store is an eCommerce goldmine, you should avoid installing too many third-party apps since each of them adds a script to your website, making it harder for browsers to process and render those pages.
Simply put, the more apps you install, the longer it will take for your online store to load. And this can negatively impact your conversion rates.
So, although you might be tempted to install numerous apps to expand the functionality of your online store, try to pick only the apps you truly need or that are multifunctional and find alternative solutions for the rest with the help of a Shopify developer (more on that later).
2. Compress Your Images
If you’re using many images on your product pages or blog posts, you must know that they might be adding to your page load times. While it might seem contradictory, sometimes the best thing to do to optimise your website’s performance is to simply remove some of those photos.
Another solution is to compress your images before uploading them to your Shopify store. If you’re using stock photos or royalty-free images from websites like Unsplash, there’s no need to compress them.
However, if your images are created in Photoshop, you can easily decrease page load times by almost 10% by compressing them with a free app like TinyPNG. In short, reducing the size of your website photos will help you shave minutes off the amount of time it takes your pages to load.
3. Use Only One Hero Image
Whenever you use multiple hero images on your product pages, you risk increasing your page load times and unknowingly frustrating your visitors. Try using only one hero image per page to maintain a consistent look and feel across your store and reduce the page loading time.
Start by reviewing your best-selling products. These are generally the best candidates for a hero image since they have already proven their appeal among your customer base. If you are having trouble selecting a hero image, consider conducting some user testing. To measure the impact of your hero image, you can use tools such as Usertesting.com.
4. Reduce the HTTP Requests
When users visit your Shopify store, the browser sends numerous HTTP requests to access the content you’ve added to specific pages. If your website has too many images and JavaScript files, it takes longer to process those HTTP requests, thus decreasing the page load speed and increasing the bounce rate.
As we’ve mentioned before, you can reduce the number of HTTP requests either by compressing your images or removing some of them. However, if your website uses several JavaScript libraries that are slowing down your Shopify store, you should reduce or even remove them from your site. Again, you can leave this task to a Shopify developer to complete if you don’t feel comfortable revising your website’s code.
5. Find a Team of Shopify Developers
Sometimes, it’s not the individual elements of your Shopify store that are slowing it down. It’s the design as a whole. If you’re getting negative feedback regarding your site speed, it might be time to get a team of Shopify developers on the case.
As a non-technical person, it can be challenging to understand how to speed up your Shopify website. If you don’t know where to start, hiring a team of Shopify experts is the best solution to boost your website’s loading speed.
With a team of developers to guide you through the process, you can test different designs to find the one that loads the fastest. You can also time those designs and figure out the best element combinations.
Level up Your Shopify Store with Customised Web Design Solutions
The performance of your website directly impacts its ability to convert users. Therefore, slow-loading pages can dramatically decrease your sales by deterring your customers from exploring your store and making a purchase.
With the right design tweaks, you can speed up your website and provide an excellent experience for your customers. At Vevol Media, we go beyond providing clients with speed optimisation services to helping them design fully functional and responsive Shopify websites that closely match their brand image to the last theme detail.
Get in touch with us to discuss how we can help you improve the performance and design of your Shopify store.