Shopify is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms that provide business owners numerous opportunities to attract more visitors to the online store and improve your website performance to increase conversions. Along with its looks, navigation, products, and services, the Shopify website’s performance and loading speed are important in attracting more customers.

However, many businesses underestimate the website speed that leads them to lose their potential customers. No matter how good your marketing efforts are if your website takes more loading time, it negatively impacts visitors and has a noticeable change on your revenue.

Therefore, it’s essential to optimize your Shopify store speed and enhance your site performance. In this article, we’ll elaborate on how you can optimize your Shopify speed and boost your site performance.

How to optimize Shopify Site Speed?

Shopify performance depends on the server, custom functionality, and frontend functions. You can check your website speed with online speed testing tools, such as Google PageSpeed optimization, GTmetrix, DevTools Google chrome, Webpage test, etc. You can give them a try and choose the suitable one for your business. Many businesses directly hire Shopify developers and let them handle all the work.

Now, let’s take a look at the ways you can optimize your Shopify site speed.

Choose Light Weight Theme

Shopify offers numerous free themes that can help you set up your site. Choosing the right Shopify theme can instantly improve your website performance and put it in a better position. However, on many websites, some themes take up a lot of space and harm your website performance.

Choosing the lightweight theme will not only save space but will also set your site up with strong performance and help the store move forward strongly. It does not mean that high-performing themes cannot be made slower, but it would be best to choose lightweight themes for better speed.

Reduce Image Size

Large images take up more space and take more loading time. Therefore, resizing the images can easily increase your Shopify store speed. As we know, good quality images are an excellent way to improve the user experience and brand image, and however, they are also one of the main reasons that impact the website speed.

Using a large number of big-size images can make the web page heavier and take more download time than small-size images and cause unnecessary performance issues. Sometimes, users have to open an extra browser and load the page to see the content. Find all large images on your website and modify them all in order to provide a smooth user experience.

Lazy Load Image

The lazy load process loads the images only as soon as they appear in the viewport. Considering the large number of images commonly used by Shopify sites, looking into lazy loading makes sense in many cases. Your Shopify website will load images less frequently since they won’t get all loaded at once, only as of the user scrolls down the page. Shopify has a thorough document on how to use Lazy Load, and you can utilize that as well. It would be highly beneficial to hire Shopify developers to implement Lazysize libraries.

Limit Third-party JavaScript and Shopify Apps

Shopify apps allow users to add functionalities to their websites without technical knowledge. Apps and third-party scripts are very useful for augmenting your Shopify store, and however, it does impact your website performance.

Every time you add a script to your website, it adds the total number of requests your site makes. Therefore, you have to consider the script size as it decreases your website performance and regularly reviews all of the tracking code, Shopify apps, and third-party resources.

Choose an alternative to the homepage hero slider

A larger hero slider and high-resolution images make the website look more appealing and sophisticated. However, high-quality images take up more space and load your store with unnecessary weight.

You can decrease the number of your slider images by up to three and optimize the photos for your Shopify store without losing its quality. Ensure that your slider follows the best user experience features and has lazy load implemented. It will make the store look more sophisticated and won’t cost much space.

You can replace all the sliders with one image, and it will increase the website speed and make the store look more attractive. Also, add accurate CTA in the image, and it will take your customers directly where you want them to go without having them navigate the whole store.

Reduce the HTTP requests

The website access the server for gathering the details, such as product list, shipping, payment methods, images, etc. If the store is not optimized, the numbers will keep increasing, resulting in more loading time and slow response.

In simple words, the more request your site makes, the more time it will take to load. To make fewer HTTP requests, you can optimize JavaScript, Combine CSS, ensure that both Java and CSS are inline, revise the installed apps, and keep the theme and image designs to a minimum.

Remove all the unnecessary style files, jQuery recalls redundant CSS and JS files, and increase the performance.

Reduce redirects and fix broken links

Redirects directly affect your online store as it impacts the website speed. Overusing the redirects can easily annoy the visitors, and it also impacts your SERP rankings. Google considers redirects as a user-experience improvement factor, and therefore, it uses redirects only when it’s necessary.

And nothing can make customers more upset than broken links. “THE WEBPAGE DOES NOT EXIST.” The message gives off a very bad customer experience and harms the business’s reputation. If it happens frequently, customers will abandon the website and move on to the next one.

Not only that, it directly affects the SEO efforts. Simply put, customers will immediately close the error page, and Google will consider it as bouncing. The more bounce rate your website gets, the less Google will trust you. As a result, your website reputation will suffer, and you may lose your SERP rankings.

Optimizing your Shopify store is not as hard as it seems. These tips will guide you through what you need to do in order to optimize your store and attract more visitors. Even if you are new in the eCommerce field, you can hire expert Shopify developers from an eCommerce website Development Company who can ease up all the processes and help you enhance your store.