Shopify Tip: Using Compressed Images to Achieve Better Page Loading Speeds

Bagging over 20% of the overall e-commerce market share, Shopify really is an undisputed power in the industry that commands control on over 2 million merchants that chose to use it as their business’s e-commerce platform. But being on Shopify doesn’t mean that you will already rule from the top or even e able to reach the top that easy. You still need to do some marketing strategies and other website customizations to ensure that your online shop runs at its best every time.

It must be able to accommodate customers and serve their needs with the least glitch possible. Your website must aim to provide the best customer journey and create a place where people congregate not just to purchase the stuff that they need but also to talk about the brand itself and bring in new people who would be interested to purchase it. For your shop to achieve this, you need to ensure that it loads fast and shows the right information.

That is why in this article, we are going to discuss 4 quick ways in how you can make your e-commerce store to work and load faster so customers will enjoy the best and most seamless online store purchase experience ever. But before getting into that, we will first talk about the impact of speed to your overall site performance.

How Loading Speeds Impact Your Shop’s Performance

You surely won’t choose a car that doesn’t speed up as fast as you want it to. In our modern day and age where most people look for speedy processes and seamless transactions, making sure that your shop works in the most optimized way possible is something that you need to really ensure. Here are some interesting facts you need to be aware of if you still aren’t convinced that improving site loading speeds would leave a positive impact on your business as a whole.

- Several surveys that have been conducted among online shoppers have revealed that over 70 percent of them actually made purchase from a shop which has better page loading speeds. Online retailers must therefore ensure that their shop performs best on this aspect.

- A single second added to the loading time actually cause a 4.42 percent drop in conversion rates. Your job especially if you are just starting with your online shop is to ensure that conversions are high. It means that every shop visitor must turn into a successful customer then a return customer and eventually a loyal one.

As these couple of statistics reveal, faster loading speeds actually influence overall website performance and ensures that your business gets the best possible income that it can produce from better conversion rates. No matter how great your product and online shop is if it does not load fast enough, your users will still leave and abandon their cart and choose to purchase from competitors.

That is why it is important that you optimized your shop so that all of its pages load faster. In fact, this should be one of your top priorities because without ensuring that, you will still end up with very low conversion rates and your business will also suffer in terms of ranking on search results. Take note that page loading speeds is one of the crucial ranking factors which Google’s Algorithms seek on websites.

So now that you learned how page loading speeds impact your online shop’s performance, it is time to learn some 4 quick tips on how you can do some optimization steps in order to ensure that every page of your shop actually loads in just a few seconds. There are actually more ways in how you can do this but we handpicked the top 4 speed optimization methods that you can try in your Shopify store so it performs better especially in the aspect of showing customers every item that you have placed in every page.

Shopify Speed Optimization Using Compressed Images

Images are no doubt one of the most important components of every website. Yes! Even those that are not into selling any product actually benefits from images but the problem is that images that are of a larger file size would actually load longer making your site very slow in terms of loading speeds. And when it comes to online stores, you would actually need more of these images in order to convince customers that your shop sells the best product ever.

That is why you need to learn how to compress images without decreasing its overall quality. Doing this isn’t really that hard and in fact, there are several free online tools that can help you accomplish this trick. Being able to decrease image size without affecting the image quality is crucial and here are some tips that you can follow:

1. High-quality images are important in ensuring that your shop only shows the best-looking pictures possible for customers to see. Seeing is believing as they would always say so take high-quality images of your product then use tools like Kraken.io to do lossless compression of the images. There are also other tools like JPEGmini for instance which can do this same job. Make sure that every image is compressed first before you start uploading them to your website.

2. Shopify also offers a variety of third-party apps that can help in compressing images to a smaller and more optimized file quality and size especially when the images are already uploaded to your shop. These apps will help you do the job for images that are already posted and would therefore take time if deleted, downloaded, then compressed once again.

3. The image’s dimension and overall quality is also important and not just the image size. That is why it’s also important that you upload and use images that are of the exact specifications as the page or section itself is asking. For instance, if the page requires an image that has a dimension of 2000x500, be sure to upload an image that matches that exact dimension. This will help the page load faster as there will no longer be any need of hiding a section of the image that you have uploaded.

4. Instead of following the recommended 2048 x 2048 product image dimension, you can do something that will help you upload more product image while preserving the great page loading speeds which your shop aims to achieve. You can use 800 x 800 images instead as it both works fine in terms of overall image quality and still allows for better loading speeds.

Conclusion

Sometimes, the best efforts in improving your Shopify store’s performance actually come in a simple package and we have just shown one of them in this article. Speeding up your website’s loading speeds isn’t really that complicated especially if it’s an online shop that you’re trying to maintain. You just need to get some images compressed and have them optimized for the best looks but smaller file size. There are several tools out there that you can actually use for this but we’re going to discuss them in our next article. Have you noticed that your shop loads slower than your competitors lately? Maybe this is the reason why. Take time and follow our tips above and you should be able to see some improvements!

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