Shopify Tips: 4 Quick Ways To Speed Up Your Shopify Website

In our modern day and age where speedy transactions have become a common trend in almost every industry, making sure that your online business is able to cope up with it is very important. You need to be able to keep up with your competitors and make sure that your website performs at its best for every customer that it aims to serve. And speed is going to be one of the most important aspects of your online shop that you need to improve. If you’re one of the those merchants that compose the over 2 million strong who chose to use Shopify as the e-commerce platform for their business then here are 4 tricks that you can try which will hopefully solve your problem on slow page loading times.

1. Use Shopify Apps Wisely

Anyone who’s been into Shopify knows that maintaining a successful online shop within this very popular platform requires the use of some third-party apps. From customer acquisition to advertising and customer retention strategies, there are apps that you can use in accomplishing these crucial efforts but the issue come when you’re using apps that run other scripts on particular webpages of your online shop as it can cause the page loading speeds to be slower than normal.

So start by looking into the apps and check which ones are being used and which ones are not. Filter them according to overall use and performance so you will find the ones that are not performing well or are simply not being used then be sure to delete them.

But you need to know that even if you have already deleted a particular app, it still wouldn’t disappear totally from your shop. There are some codes that the app itself has injected into your shop which will remain even after you delete it. So here are some tips that you can follow:

What To Do:

- When uninstalling or deleting an app, the codes which it injected don’t get deleted automatically and some of these codes may still run and make your shop slow in terms of page loading speed. That is why you will need to remove it manually so that any bloat or excess codes that causes slow page loading would be removed.

- There are also some apps that are able to add new webpage elements in your Shopify store pages. If you can, be sure to isolate these elements and keep them contained in the areas where they should be in. For instance, if an app works by placing some pop-up notifications or reminders on the checkout section, you need to keep it isolated there and not appear in any other pages since that is the only place where it is actually required.

2. Consider the AMP Strategy

Have you ever heard about AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages? If not then you need to because it is another method that you can use to speed up your website. It was created by Google years after mobile devices became mainstream in an effort to speed up the web especially on mobile devices. In our present time where most people already do shopping from their mobile phones, optimizing your online shop so it runs smoothly on these devices is crucial.

Using the app, your online shop pages can be converted into AMP so it loads faster on mobile devices since those pages are going to be indexed by Google to produce big improvements on the page load time aspect. Your Shopify business will also be placed higher in Google’s mobile search results when you start implementing AMP.

At present, mobile e-commerce already constitute over 60 percent of overall e-commerce sales and it’s projected to get higher in the coming years. That is why making your site mobile-friendly is crucial and you need to ensure that every page loads at their fastest every single time. This is the primary job of AMP so definitely look into this trick if you really want your website to run faster on mobile devices.

What To Do:

- Install apps like RocketAmp, FireAMP, or Shop Sheriff in order to implement AMP on your website since AMP cannot be implemented natively in Shopify without the use of apps like the ones already mentioned. Look into each one, learn what their features are and pick the one that you see would work on your shop. You can also ask expert advice if you need to.

- Implemeting AMP will actually need a little bit of effort and if you’re a novice Shopify businessman, you might even need expert help but once everything is setup, you will see how great the results are especially in terms of page loading times on mobile devices.

3. Use High Quality Compressed Images

Images are very important especially if you’re running an online shop on Shopify. Selling products online really requires the best quality images but as the quality of a particular image file increases so is its file size. And when all the images that you use are of high quality, it can result to a slower page loading times. That is why it is important that you know how to compress files so that the quality is preserved but the size is significantly reduced.

Yes! This is actually possible and the way in how you can do this is very straightforward. You just need to use an app or you may even compress images online. Here are some recommendations that you can follow:

What To Do:

- Use lossless compression software/services like Kraken.io or JPEGmini. And you need to be able to do this for every image that you want to upload on to our website. Doing this will significantly reduce the size of your images without the negative effects on its quality.

- If the apps have are already uploaded into your website, you can choose to use applications that can do the compression without the need of re-uploading the images. We are going to talk further about this in greater detail on our next articles.

4. Seek Expert Help

If all the above steps are done and still has not produced positive changes in terms of the page loading speed for your site’s webpages then it would be wise if you seek expert help. There are several experts and professionals in Shopify webpage development and optimization which you can contact in order to help you in the effort of improving the page loading speeds of your shop. Here are 2 common issues that you can seek help for:

What To Do:

- Simplify JavaScript and HTML: Every website would need to load JavaScript, HTML, and CSS files and if these files have plenty of things that cause bloating, your site will surely suffer in terms of its page loading speeds. That is why it is important that you employ someone who knows about the complicated stuff behind every webpage to work and simplify everything. The HTML code needs to be compacted and it should be in line with both CSS and JavaScript. If your shop is optimized in these advanced aspects then it will surely enjoy faster page loading speeds which will then translate to better conversions and more successful customer acquisition and retention campaigns.

- Get Rid of JavaScript and CSS Render-Blocking: If your site is too heavily loaded with CSS and/or JavaScript, the possibility of certain batches of CSS and JavaScript codes getting into trouble becomes higher. And when that happens, your shop will surely suffer slower page load times. To solve this, you can block the rendering of particular pages that’s causing some trouble or arrange codes so that the priority scripts and codes are loaded first. Once this is done, your customers (especially those who are using slower Internet connections) will be able to view and load webpages faster.

Conclusion

Page load speeds have become an important aspect that websites have been so focused on improving in the past years not just because it saves customers the time of browsing through and finding their favorite products but also because Google is watching over it and even made it as one of the crucial details that a website needs to excel on in order for it to be indexed higher in search results. The thing about faster loading speeds is that it not only improves conversion but also boosts your shop’s reputation. Is your shop slow? Have you been losing customers lately? Maybe your shop needs to be optimized for speed. Try the tips we shared above and see how great a difference it will bring!

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