Now is the time to speed up your Shopify website. In 2020, Shopify received close to 59 million visits—with nearly 40% coming from the U.S. alone. Currently, Shopify dominates almost 11% of the total e-commerce market share.
For business owners, this is a simultaneous dream come true and a nightmare.
Why is this?
The adoption of Shopify has created immense competition in the market for e-commerce owners who use it. There are over one million stores currently on Shopify selling everything from plants and pet products to high-end items such as cars. The availability of these options has given customers limitless possibilities. However, you cannot maintain your business simply by saying, “I sell good stuff, so you should buy from me.” It’s more about “how fast is your website when it comes to selling me stuff.”
This means, if you want to hit your revenue goal this year, you need to improve your website—first impressions matter.
5 Ways to Speed Up Your Shopify Website
Here, we’ll discuss seven ways you can optimize your Shopify website for maximum performance—and we’ll also show you why page speed matters.
1. Compress Images Before Uploading Them
Large images naturally cause an increase in bandwidth for your website—and for the server, this means additional data to load. The longer your server takes to load images, the longer your customer has to wait before seeing the appearance of their product.
In cases where customers have to wait for an extra few seconds before seeing a product’s image, this leads to a bounce rate increase. Therefore, rather than upload low-quality images to your store, you want to compress them before uploading.
Use a tool like Compressor.io to compress images while retaining quality.
With this tool, you have the option to toggle between how you want your images compressed.
You can choose among Lossy, Lossless, or Custom image compression.
Using Lossy compression: With this compression method, you get huge savings and no loss in image quality. Perfect for web images.
Using Lossless Compression: With this compression method, you get a slight file size reduction, no loss in quality. Perfect for print and high-res photographs.
Using Custom Custom Compression: This compression method lets you pick and choose how you want your image compressed.
By optimizing your images, you allow your store to load faster, increasing user experience while in your store.
2. Optimize The Apps Installed
Anyone running a Shopify store knows installing several third-party apps is necessary for getting the best out of your store. Many of them run scripts in the background that allow them to function effectively in installing and using these apps.
With these scripts running in the background, your store will inadvertently get slower due to them blocking activity on the main thread. To solve this, either uninstall apps you’re not using or delay their functionality until needed.
3. Don’t Use Image Sliders. Use Hero Layout.
For a while, image sliders were quite popular, but they affect your load time and even go as far as to damage your SEO. Sources from New Design Group report that only 1% of people actually click on sliders. Unfortunately, this stat also leaves you in a bad place in SEO, as Google doesn’t recognize text within a slide. Those it recognizes lead to duplicate H1 tags confusing the bots crawling your website to index it.
In terms of conversion rate, you also lose out as sliders lead to low click-through rates. But, again, using Hero layout saves the day.
A single hero layout with a straightforward text, simple message, and direct call to action does the job for you.
Below are three examples to give you a visual representation of the hero layout.
Peacock Alley
Bokksu
Here, you get the idea of what hero layout is—and once you switch from sliders to hero layout, your website speed drastically improves.
4. Fix Multiple Redirects and Broken Links
Multiple redirects and broken links are the main things that could slow down your website. Not only does it slow down your website, but it also hurts your SEO and conversion rate. So, you’re losing in two areas, traffic and sales.
- Fixing Multiple Redirects
Once a customer clicks on a link while visiting your store, they aim to get to the assigned destination of the link without much hassle. In cases where your website redirects them to multiple places before getting to its destination, your server surfers it on the backend. This creates an effect that reduces your overall performance.
Solving this redirect problem is part of a Shopify feature—and you can do it easily. Here’s how.
- Log in to the platform you’re migrating from
- Find the “URL redirects” section in your account settings.
- Enter your old URL in the “from” field and a new Shopify URL in the “to” field.
- Repeat this process for all the URLs you want to redirect.
- Fixing Broken Links
Broken links result from the unavailability of the content from a link, i.e., the link isn’t functioning for the content the users aim to find. These types of broken links lead to excess HTTP requests, which can affect user experience.
The best way to fix a broken link on a Shopify website is by using a tool such as:
Using any of the tools lets you find any broken links in your Shopify website. Once found, you either redirect them or completely delete them to keep them from affecting your website.
5. Use A Mobile Responsive Theme
Shopify has a lot of themes to amplify the aesthetics of your store. On desktop, these themes depict the quality of the store to a degree. However, on mobile, themes like this are unresponsive.
As many Shopify users come from mobile, using a mobile responsive theme is a more reasonable option. Depending on the theme you choose, make sure it’s mobile responsive, and update it regularly.
Bonus Tip
Cache your website on the Client Side
Traffic spikes are expected for most Shopify websites, especially during a marketing campaign or the holiday season.
In times like this, even websites with the best load time fall victim, dropping below-average scores. Client-side caching solves this by fetching cached versions of the pages from the user’s device, minimizing the transmission delay from the browser to the server.
This helps e-commerce websites load most of their pages comparatively faster than fetching responses from the server.
Related: Benefits of Using Client-side Caching for e-commerce Websites
Although optimizing your Shopify website should be your primary goal, there are some things you can’t control no matter how hard you try.
What You Can’t Control About The Speed Of Your Shopify Website
As much as speeding up your Shopify website should be your priority; certain things are beyond your control. In this case, it’s your customer devices, location, and network.
- Customer’s Device, Location, and Network
About 79% of the overall traffic to Shopify comes from mobile devices, with other devices taking up the remaining 21%. This traffic varies across the 175 countries with access to Shopify—with the U.S. as its major customer base.
This amounts to countless possibilities of customers having different devices, networks, and from various locations worldwide. Unfortunately, you cannot control any of that—so your store will load faster or slower, depending on the country from which your customers are visiting.
The same goes for the device the customer uses. Again, a high-end device will perform better than a low-end device—and at this point, website speed will vary.
As a store owner, the best thing you can do is speed up your website for most of your users. If 90% of your customers can access your store in 2.5 seconds and the remaining in 4 seconds, then, for the most part, you’re doing well.
Why is Shopify Speed Important?
Speed directly impacts how much your business earns. A fast website shows users it's high quality and trustworthy.
Research from Kissmetrics shows that every second counts—as little as a 1-second delay load time can result in a 7% conversion reduction.
Putting this in practical terms, if your e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, then a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you a $2.5 million loss in sales every year.
As a business owner, that’s money that could do a lot for your business. But, of course, you want to save it as much as possible, so the speed is essential. If that’s not enough to convince you, look at how vital speed is in these three driving factors.
1. It Improves Your SEO Ranking on Google
SEO is all about doing the best on your website to rank on Google. Among different factors that contribute to your site getting ranked on Google, speed is significant.
According to Google, the user comes first. This means if you’re doing SEO for your Shopify website, the chances of your ranking higher with a fast website increase. This is made evident by Google in their report in using site speed in web search ranking.
2. Your Overall Sales and Conversions Increases
Conversion is probably the only thing most Shopify store owners care about. But if you care so much about conversions, it makes so much sense to do your best to get the best of it.
For example, if you increase your load time from 8 seconds to 2 seconds, you get as much as a 74% increase in conversions. If you made $15,000 per month at your previous conversions, the present conversion would give you an additional $11,100.
$15,000 + $11,100 = $26,000.
At the end of the month, you end up with $26,000—that’s great for business. However, you could also be losing this much if you had a 74% decrease in conversions when you flip this.
3. Your Bounce Rates Reduce
This is the apparent impact of a fast-loading Shopify website on a business. The chances of users bouncing from your website if it loads slowly increase every second.
Here are stats—pages with 2 seconds load time have an average bounce rate of 9%.
as it extends to 5 seconds, the bounce rate increases to 38%.
It gets worse after 10 seconds, as most shoppers will likely never revisit your store.
This means, If shoppers try visiting your website and it loads fast, they’ll most likely want to stay and purchase from you. But, it loads slowly, the results can be devastating for your business.
Wrapping Up
Speeding up your Shopify website matters and contributes to the success of your business as a whole. In this article, you have seven ways you can use to improve your Shopify website. Try to use all you’ve learned and see improvements in your website’s performance.
Using Edgemesh As Your Client-Side Caching Provider
Creating a fast website ultimately leads to an increase in conversion rate, which positively impacts the revenue of a business. This is why businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve their website speed—even if it’s by a single second.
Client-side caching is the best for doing this, and that’s how we at Edgemesh help you. We use your traffic to create automated, real-time speed optimizations for your website. In addition, our advanced pre-cached technology allows your customers to pre-load your content before they request it.
As we’ve seen, this method results in your website running 20-50% faster without changing your database or front-end infrastructure—and it’s all done with a single line of code. In addition, we integrate with most of the platforms you’re likely using or will use when it comes to compatibility.
These include:
- Shopify
- Magento
- Big Commerce
- WooCommerce
- WordPress
- Cloudflare, and
- Custom Sites (NodeJs, Netlify, Gatsby, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, etc.)
Edgemesh makes it easy to speed up your website without the need for a developer.
Do customer experience, good conversions, low bounce rates and overall, speed matter to you? Then you’ll love Edgemesh’s Enterprise-Grade Web Acceleration.
Our intelligent, automated, and next-generation client-side caching readies your website to move at full speed—with just a single line of code. Plus, it takes under 5 minutes to set up.
What do you say?
Start your 14-day trial to get a feel for what speed means to your business.
