A Guide to Shopify Speed Optimization

A Guide to Shopify Speed Optimization
A Guide to Shopify Speed Optimization

Ecommerce has evolved to become a massive industry that is generating revenue in trillions of dollars worldwide. It has been observed that a significant majority of eCommerce websites have been built using CMSs (Content Management Systems). Shopify is one of the leading CMS solutions used by eCommerce merchants in 175 countries worldwide. There are around 4 million websites built using Shopify eCommerce solutions that are live to date. Approximately 29% of hosted websites in the US are developed using Shopify.

Ecommerce merchants like it because of its cloud-based, cost-effective eCommerce services and supportive applications that help them make their websites highly efficient and interactive. That being said, it is worth mentioning that Shopify websites can also become a victim of slow speed. However, it is not a tricky task to make your Shopify website speed faster. We have put together some tips and tricks to help you in this regard. If you own or manage an online store built using Shopify, this writing will help you make it work swiftly. 

Further details are given below:

Compress High-Resolution Pictures

The first thing you need to do in the quest to make your Shopify website faster is to upload images that are well-optimized for the web. By optimization of images for the web, we mean suitable file sizes of the images that you will be uploading on your website. Of course, we know you can’t compromise the quality of pictures a lot when it comes to reducing the file size of images. Still, an image compressor can help you reduce the file size of an image significantly without affecting its quality too much.

You must upload an image and choose the reduction level in size before clicking the compress button. After clicking the button, you will get an image file with a considerably reduced size. You can also do batch compression with the help of a photo compressor. When the file size of images uploaded on the website is not too large, they won’t take much time to load, and your website will work swiftly. You can either compress image size online with the help of a compressor or go for the specified plugins that will be attached to your Shopify website.

Upload Pictures with Right Dimensions

This mistake is often made by Shopify website owners while uploading images. They compress the images to reduce their file size but often forget to crop them according to their display size on the website. Instead, they leave it to the code working in the website’s background. The process of resizing images according to their display size on the website takes significant time, which ultimately makes the website slower.

You can resolve these issues by keeping the intrinsic size of images equal to the render size of images. The render size can be referred to as the size in which the image would be displayed on the website, and intrinsic size is the original size of the image. You can keep both sizes equal by cropping images and modifying their dimensions according to the website’s requirements before uploading them. Doing this will help you shorten the time taken by the code to load images.

Opt for the Right Shopify Theme

Images are not the only reason behind the slow speed of Shopify websites. Sometimes the main culprit behind this whole issue is their themes. Unfortunately, eCommerce merchants often ignore the importance of having a well-optimized, fast, and responsive theme. This ignorance often leads to a below-average website speed, which eventually leads to the loss of promising prospects. Hence, it is highly essential to carry out substantial research before choosing a theme for your Shopify website to make sure that it doesn’t affect your website’s speed.

A few factors to look out for a while opting for a Shopify theme are FCP (First Colorful Paint) and TTI (Time to Interactive). The benchmark values of both these factors are 1.1s and 2.5s, respectively. However, you should ensure that the theme chosen for your Shopify website should offer around an FCP of 1.8s, and the TTI should be well below 8 seconds for a faster website. Moreover, look for the font styles that are commonly used instead of going for the rare ones because the browser takes a significant time to download fonts that are not commonly accessible, which eventually leads to a slow loading speed of your website.

End Words!

Shopify CMS sees its frequent use in developing online shopping stores worldwide. However, some people complain about the low speeds of Shopify websites as compared to other content management systems. Therefore, we have discussed a few tips and tricks above to help you boost the speed of your website and make it a conversion machine for your business. 

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John Smith
An engineer by degree and blogger by choice. Interested in writing the latest updates happening around the world. Loves to binge watch tv-series and movies.

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