Shopify Site Speed Optimization: Tips and Tricks to Help Boost Your Conversions!

With internet infrastructure only getting better and better with time, people’s tolerance for slow-loading sites has dwindled rather meteorically. As things stand at present, approximately 53% of visitors prefer to bounce from a page if it takes any longer than 3 seconds to materialize on their screens. As an e-commerce player then, you must prioritize site speed optimization, assigning it the same devotion and care that you generally reserve for other aspects of your online store such as product curation and interface design. 

Even if your offerings are superior to those of your competitors, the same won’t reflect in your balance sheet at the end of the day should your Shopify site take forever to load! Wondering what all you can do to optimize your site for speed? Well, that’s precisely what we are going to address in detail in today’s blog. Read on and find out!

1. Select a lightweight theme

One of the relatively simpler ways in which you can optimize your Shopify site for speed is by exercising acuity in your choice of theme. Because themes are pretty central towards determining a store’s appeal, their curation is attended to with great care by businesses. However, in the process of trying to tick a diverse number of boxes, more often than not, brands make the mistake of opting for themes that come equipped with plenty of baggage, ones that contain bits and bobs that service their requirements in no productive manner.

So, then, what kind of themes are more likely to ensure a fast loading time for your store? Themes that are minimalist; themes that have a clutter-free layout; themes that have a succinct and clean code; themes that are responsive. But, choosing a theme in accordance with these parameters is still not sufficient reason for you to commit fully to them; you must perform a speed test, eventually, and let the findings from the same guide your selection.

2. Get rid of unwanted features and apps

It’s not uncommon for businesses to install various apps and features on their store with a view to improving its functionality and offering a superlative experience to customers. The issue arises, however, when a bunch of these additions go unutilized; while they remain unsummoned by you, they continue to consume resources, as their code keeps running in the background. And what that, in turn, does is- you probably guessed it- slow down your Shopify site. To avoid such scenarios, Shopify recommends its users keep their downloaded apps to a maximum of 20; anything beyond that is a recipe for trouble. 

Hence, it’s always a good practice to conduct a regular assessment of your store so that you’re constantly in the know regarding which apps are being regularly engaged and which are not. 

Particularly, keep an eye out for features that you download to make use of during a particular season and then forget to remove them afterwards. Once you zero in on the apps you wish to delete, the process to do the same is quite straightforward- click on “Apps” on your Shopify home page. Then, select “Apps and sales channel settings”; this will allow you to view all your installed apps. To remove an app, hover above it and click “Uninstall”.

3. Optimize images and other visual media

While using high-quality images for your Shopify site is an absolute must, one must also deal tactfully with the trait that is inherent to them- large file sizes. And because, as we all know, large files warrant longer download durations, your site speed takes a hit. Therefore, it is crucial to optimize the images you are adding to your site. How can you go about that, you wonder? Let’s take a look:

• Before discussing an optimization technique, the first piece of advice we’d like to offer you is to keep the number of images on your site to an absolute minimum, to begin with. We totally understand the significance images hold toward shaping a customer’s visual experience but, you know, too much of a good thing and all that? Try to use only those images that supplement a visitor’s understanding of your offerings and steer clear of adding any that serve solely a decorative purpose. 
• Resize large images. Typically, images don’t get uploaded at their render size but instead at relatively larger sizes, thereby impeding your site’s performance (you can find out an image’s render size by hovering over its link). Thus, you must identify and resize such images on your site. You can leverage Chrome DevTools to go about this- right-click on your page and select “Inspect”. Next, go to the “Network” tab and refresh your page. Now, you will be able to see all the resources that get utilized in the loading of your page. Finally, to locate the larger images, all you need to do is sort by “Size”. 
• Compress your images; this will let you reduce the file size of the image without significantly compromising their quality. You can either use Shopify apps to do this (some of them automatically compress images as soon as they are uploaded such as Crush.pics) or use external tools like TinyPNG or Optimizilla. 
• Have GIFs on your page? Consider substituting them with static images to improve your site’s speed. Sure, GIFs offer your customers an engaging, interactive experience but they also pack large file sizes (a couple of GIFs can amount to as much as 10MB)  which can cause your page to considerably slow down. Hence, wherever possible, replace your animated GIFs with static images. 
• Use lazy loading- meaning images present in a portion of a page load only when a visitor scrolls down to that particular section. To implement this technique, go to your image HTML tags and add a loading=”lazy” attribute. 
• Adding videos to your site is a great way to demonstrate the working of your products and win the confidence of visitors. However, much like GIFs, videos, too, demand a high real estate (much higher when compared to GIFs) and thus can affect your page’s performance. Is there any workaround? Yes! Instead of directly uploading the video on your page, you can host it on an external source such as YouTube or Vimeo. 

4. Monitor the fonts you are using

What kind of font you choose to use can also have an impact on your site’s speed. Broadly, there exist two kinds of fonts:

1. System fonts: These are fonts installed by default on your computer.
2. Web fonts: These are fonts that need to be downloaded by the user.

While web fonts bring more to the table on the creative front, they call for additional requests (since they need to be loaded from a source), and in the process can slow up your site. Plus, there might also be delays in their rendering, resulting in a subpar user experience. For these reasons, businesses are generally advised to opt for system fonts that are compatible with diverse applications and operating systems. Some system fonts that are popular among businesses are:

• Times New Roman
• Monaco
• Garamond
• Georgia
• Courier New
• Menlo
• Trebuchet MS
• Lucide Grande
• Palatino 

5. Strive to cut down redirects

Minimizing unnecessary redirects can go a long way towards improving the performance of your Shopify site. How? Because, the more the number of redirects on your site, the higher the number of HTTP requests that need to be made. And we all know what a high number of HTTP requests translates to. Additionally, you must also steer clear of redirect loops (where redirect pages end up leading visitors to other redirect pages; a situation that is extremely frustrating for a visitor).

Wrapping it up

Improving the speed of your Shopify site can improve your conversions by leaps and bounds, allowing you to comfortably outrank your competitors. We hope the insights shared above will help you elevate the performance of your online store! Get in touch with mavlers to get more informative insights on shopify website.