5 Non-Technical Ways To Improve Your Shopify Website Speed
How does your Shopify site perform on mobile? Is a slow mobile experience causing visitors to leave your site?
As more and more users are browsing sites and buying products from their smartphones, they expect a site to load as soon as they open it. Slow loading web pages can lead to a high bounce rate and less traffic. It may even affect
SEO as Google considers page load speed in it's algorithms.
How To Test Your website speed
There are various tools you can use to test the speed of your website. Here are a few of the most popular ones.- Check mobile and desktop performance with PageSpeed Insights - this tool by Google gives you a score and suggestions for improvements. You can try it here.
- Use the Test My Site Tool to analyse mobile friendliness and mobile page speed. Try it here.
- Pingdom is also another great tool for testing load speed of your website. You can try it here.
5 Non-Technical Ways To Improve Improve Your Website Speed
Without going into too much technical detail about minifying CSS, elimiating render-blocking scripts etc, here are some tips that you can apply to your own site to help improve speed.
1) Compress your images
The number one thing you can do to improve your website speed, particularly on mobile is to optimise your images. Image compression is important and is a must for faster loading pages.
For new images that you are going to add to your Shopify store you can use tinyjpg.com/ or tinypng.com/ for free to reduce your image size.
For existing images in your Shopify store, you can use apps from the Shopify app store to compress your images. Here are 2 I recommend:
2) Use a fast responsive theme
Not all themes are equal when it comes to efficient coding and speed optimisation. Here is a link to a site that compares the speed of Shopify theme demos: fastshopifythemes.com/
Top tips:
- look for a fast responsive Shopify theme
- run the theme demo through Google PageSpeed Insight and check the outcome
- make sure you are using the latest version of a theme as there may be improvments to speed and other areas that developers have made
3) Don't install to many apps
Most apps from the Shoify App Store add some javascript or CSS files to your store. If the app isn't critical to your store, remove it. If you aren't using the app the javascript/CSS will still be running in the background making your site performance slower.
4) Reduce Redirects & Broken Links
Unnessary redirects create performance and speed issues. You can check what redirects you have for your Shopify site by going to Online Store - Navigation from your Shopify Admin.
Broken links on your site aren't good for SEO and can increase HTTP requests. You can use a free tool such as this to check your site for broken links: www.brokenlinkcheck.com/
5) Get rid of the slideshow!
Sliders have been popular for a while now and when you add 4 or 5 images to the slider, this increases the overall load time of your website.
When I build sites for my clients I tend to stay away from a slideshow and opt for a single hero image instead with a clear call-to-action. Most users aren't going to stay at the top of your site waiting to see all the slides anyway, and if it slows everything down then they will probably leave your site altogether.
Need Some Help?
I hope you found this information useful. If you find the page speed of your Shopify site isn't up to scratch and would like some help to implement some of these suggestions, just get in touch and I'll be happy to help!