More than ever, internet users are impatient. Approximately 70% of customers acknowledge that a sluggish website decreases their propensity to purchase from an Internet merchant. This means that maintaining their efficiency while simultaneously offering stunning, content-rich digital experiences requires careful consideration.
What is website speed optimization?
The method for increasing the speed at which your pages load is called website speed optimization. Its objective is to make your e-commerce store load as quickly as possible before potential buyers become dissatisfied with their online experience and close their browser tab. This technique is also referred to as website performance optimization.
When assessing speed, two essential metrics are employed:
- Page speed is a measurement of how quickly material loads from a URL.
- Site speed is a measure of the overall performance of your website. Services such as Google PageSpeed Insights evaluate different load times on your website collectively to assign a score.
For an e-commerce website, Google suggests a page load time of two seconds. However, in general, speed is advantageous. For every extra second that your website takes to load, your average conversion rate as an e-commerce store drops by 0.3%. Josh Stutt, marketing head at the49, a digital innovation consultancy, asserts that “humans are impatient.” “Everyone can recall instances when they attempted to visit a website, but it took a while to load, so they just closed the tab.”
For example, if your company has 5,000 daily visits and an average order value of $60, a one-second lag in site speed may be losing you $9,000 every day.
Why is website speed important?
Your website’s speed will determine how well it attracts visitors, including those who drop out of slower competitors’ sites.
In actuality, conversion rates can be positively impacted by even a millisecond increase in site speed. Retail conversions climbed by 8.4%, according to Deloitte, with a 0.1-second boost in site speed. Those customers made a single fast-loading session cost over 10% extra.
Portent’s research supports these conclusions. It was discovered that e-commerce websites with a one-second load time had a conversion rate that was 2.5 times greater than those with a five-second load time.
Additionally detrimental to your SEO rank and searchability are slow-loading websites. The largest search engine in the world, Google, gives preference in its search results to websites with strong core web vitals, or website performance.
Additionally, if you’re using paid search to get customers, delayed landing pages will result in a lower Google Ads Quality Score and a higher cost per click. That’s an expensive issue at a time when advertising and client acquisition expenses are rising disproportionately in most sectors of the economy.
Common factors that affect website speed
Your online storefront
An e-commerce platform with the necessary infrastructure in place to improve load times is what your company requires. To ensure that customers can view your websites rapidly, as a platform user, you should discuss back-end site enhancements with your platform provider.
When a person loads a page in their web browser, an HTML markup is created during the rendering process. The rendering process is dictated by your e-commerce infrastructure.
For instance, the Storefront Renderer (SFR) software from Shopify is designed to fulfill storefront requests as quickly as possible, resulting in server-side performance increases of 2.5 to 5 times faster than requests that are done without SFR.
According to Chris McCarron, the owner of GoGoChimp, “render blocking means that things like JavaScript or CSS files are stopping a webpage from showing up quickly.” “A browser must pause and download these files to display the remainder of the webpage when it tries to load it.”
Cache misses, or the times when a page or other requested data isn’t located in the cache memory and needs to be retrieved from other cache levels or the main memory, are where SFR yields the most improvements in website speed.
When Rhone Apparel began utilizing SFR in April 2020, they saw significant advancements over the preceding month:
- 15% growth in income
- 17% higher conversion rate
- A 12% drop in the typical page load
- The average server response time decreased by 37.95%.
- A 3% reduction in the bounce rate
The remaining recommendations won’t have as much of an impact if your commerce platform isn’t dedicated to placing a premium on speed. With Shopify, you can take control of the speed of your e-commerce website by focusing on the following areas to enhance it even more.
Attending to
The performance of your e-commerce website might be affected by your infrastructure and hosting provider, particularly on days with a lot of traffic and transactions.
The list of well-known retailers—including Lululemon, J. Crew, and Lowe’s—whose e-commerce sites crash during major sales events like Black Friday keeps becoming longer. In a survey, 81% of participants stated that a 60-minute delay costs their company more than $300,000.
When investigating the need for a hosting platform, keep an eye out for:
- Limits on memory or bandwidth to accommodate seasonal and ongoing marketing
- anticipated traffic and peak user load to prevent crashes caused by an unexpected increase in visits
- Ask your commerce platform provider for assistance in getting ready for unforeseen traffic spikes or a rush of orders before any significant sales event.
While dealing with site outages is never simple, it may be particularly problematic for a $5 billion firm during its busiest sales season of the year. Due to site problems, JB Hi-Fi’s website was down for two hours during BFCM. “We have observed websites belonging to well-known retailers going down,” says Chris Lang, general manager of engineering at JB Hi-Fi. “Everyone in the nation is aware of it. Customers and the brand both suffer from it. We’d stop at nothing to prevent that.
JB Hi-Fi witnessed record-breaking sales after switching to Shopify Plus, all without experiencing any problems with website speed. This was made possible by nearly twice as much online traffic during BFCM.
Shopify Plus boasts a 99.98% overall uptime with its cloud-based architecture, and its storefront loads 2.97 times faster than other SaaS systems.
Website design
A range of architectures are used by e-commerce websites to display information to consumers and browsers. As you grow, this might become more complicated, according to Shopify’s data science manager Javier Moreno: “Brands get richer websites as they expand and become more sophisticated. Usually, this richness has a cost; updates will cause your site to load more slowly unless you are continually monitoring it.
Some retailers use headless commerce, which separates your e-commerce website’s front end from the back-end infrastructure that drives it, in an attempt to speed up their websites.
Shopify Commerce Components retailers elevate this to a new level. Rather than loading a browser with an excessive number of snippets of code that adversely impact site speed, they take the e-commerce technology they require when they re
quire them.
Too many third-party apps
Most likely, you aren’t using every one of the more than 20 ecommerce plug-ins that are installed on your store. Perhaps you neglected to uninstall some after installing them as a trial. Still operating in the background, those programs can be deliberately degrading the functionality of your website.
Hire a developer to get rid of any extraneous applications. Next, use PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to perform automated page speed testing. You may also use Chrome’s Developer tools to perform a manual test. To refresh the page, select the “Network” tab.
Every time you wish to install a new app, consider whether the benefit it will provide will offset any potential reduction in load speed.
The <head> of your theme. liquid file, located inside {{ content_for_header }}, is where most script/CSS files for apps obtained through the Shopify Plus Admin are inserted.
Before loading any additional code, an application must be displayed.
“We async load scripts added with Script Tag API—so the page load isn’t halted,” says Jason Bowman, a solutions engineering team lead at Shopify Plus. “We navigate this tension between faster loading versus the experiential and sales value of apps.” On the other hand, performance is frequently affected immediately when <scripts> are inserted straight into the <head>.
Just as every team will have a distinct idea of what constitutes a fast website, each speed testing tool utilizes a different score system. The results of “page load” timing tools must include a single time marker, such as “time to first byte” (TTFB).
Make decisions based on these speed tests, but maintain an open mind. You need to create a user interface that maximizes your customers’ journey while maintaining a fast website.
PageSpeed Insights from Google
A Google Labs tool called PageSpeed Insights provides you with tailored recommendations on how to enhance the functionality of your website. Additionally, it highlights the JavaScript and CSS elements on your website that cause the page to load slowly.
Josh Stutt states, “I always make sure every project I work on is tested on Google PageSpeed Insights or a similar tool.” “Before you can improve, you need to know how you’re doing and where you might be weak.”
You can even examine how well your rivals’ mobile websites function. You can steer clear of the same blunders by being aware of the issues with their website.
GTMetrix
GTMetrix assigns a speed grade of A to F to your website. It creates a website performance report by combining information from Yslow and PageSpeed Insights, which includes:
- The speed at which your page loads
- Analysis of Lighthouse and Web Vitals
- Opportunities for improving the speed of websites
- Breakdown of the page composition by requests and total byte size
Pingdom
Your website’s performance will be graded by Pingdom.com (from 0% to 100%). It also includes a helpful function called “waterfall analysis” that aids in locating more significant issue locations. This line-by-line grading serves as a helpful guide.
How to optimize your website speed
Make use of a CDN (content delivery network)
A global collection of servers is called a content delivery network, or content distribution network (CDN). Local user experiences are accelerated by distributing the content delivery load via the server nearest to the visitor’s location.
A content delivery network (CDN), or in Shopify’s case, multiple CDNs, is an essential component for platform performance as more e-commerce companies expand internationally.
Shopify provides a free, top-notch CDN powered by Fastly. These days, there are fewer, more potent Fastly Points of Presence (PoPs) dispersed throughout key global regions. They can serve more from the cache, including static and event-driven information, thanks to high-density PoPs. Better user experiences follow as a result of increasing your cache hit ratio.
In general, CDNs lower costs and boost speed. Owner of Red Dress Boutique Diana Harbour states, “We saved about $100,000 per year right off the bat getting our license, hosting, and CDN from Shopify Plus.”
Consider graphic content, which frequently contributes to sluggish website performance. When any of your assets—such as photos, JavaScript, and CSS—change, Shopify notifies the CDN.
Use Shopify for this.
Shopify retailers may automatically apply version numbers to all of the URLs we create by using the asset_url filter. A version number added to the end of a URL, for instance, might resemble this: ?v=1384022871. The CDN is instructed to get the accurate version using this filter. After you’ve made changes to your material, you might not see the asset you anticipate without it.
The URL will also be static if you directly reference content in your CSS. Additionally, it won’t have the Shopify-updated asset version.
Add the asset_url filter to your CSS code to enable automatic updating. See the Shopify Help Center for details on all of the URL filters that aid in asset extraction.
Don’t change the motif too drastically.
The way a website looks determines whether or not a customer will interact with it. According to studies, 94% of first impression decisions are related to design, and they are made quickly. In less than a tenth of a second, a website visitor forms their first impression.
However, there is a trade-off between having a beautiful theme and a fast website; the latter frequently comes with a lot of extraneous visuals and cluttered code. Josh Stutt asserts, “You don’t need a theme with all the bells and whistles.” One that is tidy, quick, and simple to use is what you need. By only moving to a more minimalist theme, I’ve witnessed a rise in new visitor homepage bounce rates of more than 50%.
“Quick speed hacks will not build the foundation for long-term performance—only real speed improvements will, and that starts with optimizing your underlying theme architecture,” states Nirav Sheth, CEO and founder of Anatta.
Turn on fast view for category pages.
Instead of forcing you to visit a product detail page, quick-view pop-ups show a product straight from a product listings page.
Although fast view is supposed to save your consumers time, in practice it might make their experience on your e-commerce site worse:
- It prolongs the customer’s journey by one step.
- It can be accidentally clicked, which annoys the user.
- It can be misinterpreted as a product page.
- Most notably, it can cause a noticeable delay in the loading of your page.
Some quick-view pop-up implementations (from apps or themes) can load the content of a complete product page in advance if a visitor hits the “Quick View” button.
However, loading so much data is quite a task, particularly for a collection page that has twenty or thirty product images. You may determine whether your clients are even using the quick view by using click mapping, a JavaScript-based tool that tracks where users scroll or move their pointer to click on your web pages.
Here are a few helpful apps:
- In retrospect
- Hotjar
- Look for Quick View on Shopify.
If your storefront product thumbnails have a Quick View option, it should be simple to find it. Look for a setting in your theme customizer to allow or prohibit this feature. Look into whether this option is coming from an app if you can’t find it in the theme customizer. If so, the removal process ought to be clear-cut.
It’s probably built into the theme itself if the previous two steps don’t solve the problem. Then, a developer is required to locate and eliminate it. To help with this procedure, look for a Shopify Plus Service Partner.
After a visitor clicks the Quick View pop-up button, use AJAX to retrieve the product details. Alternatively, store a subset of the product data as data attributes on the product grid item. Next, use JavaScript to generate the HTML and make it come up dynamically.
Eliminate pointless pop-ups
Pop-ups are used to show promotional content or persuade users to proceed to the next stage of the customer journey. Pop-ups encourage first-time visitors to interact with the site and provide their email addresses or redeem a voucher to initiate further communication.
On the other hand, e-commerce pop-ups are a fine art. In addition to detracting visitors from interacting with material that has already been optimized for conversions, an excessive number of flashing visuals can negatively impact a website’s speed and efficiency.
Establish guidelines for using pop-ups to avoid slowing down the pace of your website. For instance, you could design pop-up triggers to prevent unnecessary code from making a page load slowly. Exit intent or time delay pop-ups that appear instantly when the page loads. There is a buffer between the original page load and the pop-up load thanks to both of these triggers.
Load up the hero sliders on the site.
Large slideshows with multiple heroes are excellent for showcasing your merchandise. Sadly, there is a drawback: loading times may be accelerated if a hero slider has more than four or five slides due to the size and quality requirements.
Reduce the quantity of homepage sliders or do away with them entirely. Because the brain analyzes visual information 60,000 times quicker than words, a single, well-considered hero image with a clear call to action can help attract clients immediately.
If you must use a slider, adhere to recommended UX guidelines, such as these:
- Limit your presentation to two or three slides.
- Instead of automatically spinning carousels, present the slides as static content pieces.
- As a catch-all, use Lazy Load or srcset.
For example, Chubbies’ homepage hero slider is replaced with optimized photos. Tom Montgomery, a co-founder, states, “We have used Shopify since the beginning. Since none of us are engineers, it’s wonderful to be able to rely on Shopify’s knowledge base while we concentrate on creating new ideas.
Reduce, resize, and compress pictures
Between fifty and seventy-five percent of the weight of your web pages is made up of images. When your e-commerce website grows, this can become a bigger issue. You have more image files on your server the more things you sell. There is a new HTTP request sent for each image you utilize on a page. Reducing the size of photos allows you to communicate more with less while optimizing page speed.
“When you’re constantly creating content through blog posts or creating many products a day, you tend to just add images to the website without thinking,” explains Alex Mirzaian, marketing manager at Eightvape. When your website contains thousands of photographs, it might be really helpful to compress the images.
Using programs like TinyJPG or TinyPNG, you can use lossless compression to reduce the size of images without sacrificing quality.
Additionally, be cautious about empty image sources in your code—<img src =”>. By submitting an additional request to your servers, put an excessive amount of load on the browser. CSS “sprites,” which combine several pictures, such as icons, into one, are a straightforward workaround that reduces the quantity of separate image requests the server must process. It speeds up your page as well.
You can download the highest-quality image at the smallest size by using Shopify’s built-in image size settings. It first requests the precise image size from Shopify, then it minimizes the file size retrieved from the CDN and minimizes the necessary browser-side scaling.
According to Maria Harutyunyan, co-founder of Loopex Digital, “We started by optimizing the images because one of our clients had a slow-loading site.” “We reduced and resized them, which significantly improved the loading speed of the pages. The photos load considerably faster and occupy 60% less area today.
For videos, use light embeds.
Video is gradually taking over as the primary medium on the internet; 91% of businesses utilize it for marketing. However, there may be significant variations in load times based on how they are integrated into your website.
The usual embed code from YouTube employs the <iframe> tag, which fixes the width and height of the video player, and not only makes your site obese because some files are downloaded even before the visitor clicks the Play button. The size of your movie does not change to fit the screens of various devices.
Lightweight embeds, which load the videos directly onto your webpage, are the solution. The website only embeds the YouTube video’s thumbnail when the page first loads. When the user clicks inside the thumbnail, the video player (together with all of its associated JavaScript) loads.
- Because YouTube thumbnails only weigh around 15 kilobytes, light embeds can make webpages nearly a megabyte smaller.
- Cut down on broken links and redirects
- An excessive number of broken links and redirects can degrade performance and lower your SEO rankings.
Take some time to tidy up your redirects. For instance, your SEO may suffer from 302 redirects, which show that a page has been temporarily moved. They also cause data transfers to be delayed and more HTTP requests to be made.
Use Shopify’s built-in redirects feature, which is 301s by default, or a “cacheable redirect” inside your Navigation panel as an alternative. Never reroute URLs to pages that are also redirects, and keep this in mind.
Broken links for CSS, JS, and image elements on your page cause more HTTP requests, which slows down your website. To get rid of them, use a program like Broken Link Checker. Developing personalized 404 error pages will help users who inadvertently type the wrong URL for your website.
Turn on lazy loading.
One method for preventing all material from loading instantly on a webpage is called lazy loading. Lazy-loading e-commerce sites only show content when visitors interact with specific triggers.
When a visitor hits your e-commerce product page, we can observe slow loading in action. Only content that can be seen above the fold—such as the item’s title, description, and images—appears when the page is opened. Below this area, reader
s can scroll to see supporting content. Customer reviews, social media carousels, and user-generated content are all loaded gradually to avoid the code overloading the server with too much data at once.
Chris McCarron of GoGoChimp employed the following website speed optimization technique for a client’s online store: “Every homepage had an astounding quantity of images that were below the fold. The issue with this is that, regardless of which images are visible, a web browser will download all of the images on a webpage at the same time. Lazy load, on the other hand, only downloads a picture if the browser can view it.
Release the browser from scripts that obstruct parsers.
“Parsing the HTML” is the procedure a browser must go through before it can show a page to your consumer. However, parser-blocking scripts halt this procedure: A browser cannot perform any other function after it comes across a parser-blocking script; it must halt all other operations and concentrate solely on executing the script.
Thankfully, there’s a simple workaround that only requires the “async” or “defer” attribute.
Blocking parsers:
It’s important to note that JavaScript by itself does not block browsers; rather, the way JavaScript loads controls whether or not the browser is blocked. Verify that your website is still providing the intended experience after applying these code modifications.
Use Google Tag Manager to arrange tracking.
Your digital marketing and e-commerce efforts are powered by customer data. However, gathering that information can potentially make your website perform worse. Frequently, the cause is all those JavaScript tracking tags (for objectives, conversions, general analytics, and behavioral retargeting, among others).
Your marketing, IT, and development teams may also find it time-consuming and resource-intensive to gather customer data. For example, Google Tag Manager is a tag management system (TMS) that combines all of your tags into a single JavaScript request. Having a TMS also makes it easier to swiftly delete the tag if a tag failure takes down your website.
According to Nirav Sheth, “the combination of leveraging Shopify APIs and cleaning up Google Tag Manager moved the needle for site speed more than anything else” when Anatta was optimizing the website speed of an e-commerce site in the beauty industry.
With Google Tag Manager, you can manage all of your Shopify Plus store tags in one location with just a single piece of code. Consult the Shopify Plus Help Center guidelines for additional information.
Watch out for too many liquid loops.
One strong Shopify coding language is Liquid. But there are times when you have to balance the trade-offs against the extra rewards.
One example of such is the for loop iteration. Forloop refers to the situation when the system must loop through, crawl through, or search through every product in a collection to find a particular condition (such as a price or a tag).
In some situations, these features—like producing graphics or product variations—can be helpful. They’re also useful when a collection page has fewer products, but watch out for how it affects load times.
Make sure you aren’t executing liquid for loops repeatedly in search of the same data by checking the theme code. When several developers work on a theme, it’s possible for duties to be duplicated or for conflicting code to be introduced. You can speed up the loading of your page by eliminating these duplicates.
Using a basic product is usually easier. Loop for options with values. To learn how liquid loops and Shopify’s templating language operate, read the documentation.
How to run a website speed test
A set of measures called core web vitals is used to assess the speed of websites. Users were 24% less likely to leave a website mid-page load on those that met these key web essential requirements.
- The page that has fully loaded: This is the most common way to gauge how long it takes for a page to load completely.
- Time to first byte: The amount of time needed for a page to begin loading.
The first important factor to consider is how quickly a website’s visitors can load enough content for them to understand it.
Each of these essential site elements receives a status rating from Google PageSpeed Insights: Good, Needs Improvement, and Poor. You’ll also notice site-specific web speed recommendations beneath each score.
Optimizing speed for mobile
The trend of mobile shopping is expected to continue expanding; by 2025, mobile commerce sales are expected to make up 10.4% of all ecommerce purchases.
Not all mobile buyers are content to spend money on websites that load slowly, even with strong mobile purchase rates. So much so that an 8.4% increase in conversion rates can be achieved with just a millisecond increase in mobile load speed.
Corporate apparel and gift company Merchology decided to revamp its mobile website to provide a mobile-first user experience after realizing that the majority of its mobile visitors weren’t converting. Merchology saw a 40% increase in mobile conversion rates two months after introducing the mobile website.
Here’s how to ensure that your website performs as well as or better than its rivals, both in terms of speed and mobile-friendliness.
Construct Quick Mobile Pages
A Google-sponsored initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) restructures website content for mobile platforms. Google caches every page on websites that have enabled AMP and reloads it whenever a user visits from a search. Because of the faster page loads, visitors spend twice as much time on the website and convert at a rate of 20% higher than on non-AMP pages.
Use AMP, Fire AMP, or The AMP App—Shopify apps—to implement AMP on your online store. Each frees your mobile website from cluttered, complex coding so that pages load quickly.
Turn off the autoplay of mobile videos.
Not every mobile internet user is using a good network connection to browse your e-commerce website. Maybe they’re a customer of Allbirds, checking out the online store while on a trek and their sneakers break. Alternatively, they may be a Firebelly Tea client waiting in the parking lot for their kids to get out of school, placing an order for their upcoming box of tea bags.
In any case, these individuals may interact with the videos that merchants post on their mobile websites to reach out to prospective customers. However, letting these movies play automatically can seriously slow down a website.
When a video is set to autoplay, a sizable file must be downloaded via the mobile network connection. If that is swapped out for a static thumbnail and an optional play button, then a shaky internet connection doesn’t have to load the full-size file. In record time, visitors get their first meaningful view.
Make the mobile checkout more efficient.
When optimizing a mobile website for speed, the checkout process is frequently overlooked. The most care is paid to the home, product, and category pages, mostly because you don’t want potential customers to abandon their first mobile engagement with your store.
You’ll probably see a greater cart abandonment rate if your website speed optimization strategy excludes the checkout phase. People are self-assured enough to choose the things they wish to purchase by hand. However, they won’t be able to stay if they encounter delays at the register unless they truly adore the item they have in their cart. (Translation: You’ll lose those impulsive buyers.)
With Shop Pay, mobile customers can speed through the checkout process like never before. Shopify reports that the mobile checkout-to-order rate for merchants utilizing Shop Pay checkouts is 1.91 times higher than that of traditional checkout.
According to Benjamin Sehl, co-founder of Kotn, “The majority of our customers today are discovering new products on the go on their mobile devices, and if they have to fill out a form, we’ve lost them.” “Since Shop Pay is integrated into the million-merchant ecosystem, even new customers can check out with just one click, transforming what was once the most traumatic part of the customer experience into a delightful one.”
Optimize your website speed and watch the conversion impact
Obtaining support from your team is crucial if you want to devote time and funds to improving the functionality and speed of your website. You can construct a case using the information and resources we’ve provided.
Many of these adjustments are made on their own. In situations when it isn’t feasible, you can ask a Shopify Plus Partner for assistance. Their advice on optimizing your Shopify website’s speed is available.
Conclusion
To maintain your competitiveness in 2024, you must put these 12 technical e-commerce speed improvement ideas into practice. For a successful online presence, prioritize performance, improve user experience, and increase conversions. A quick and responsive e-commerce website can help you stay ahead of the curve.”
Appic Softwares is an excellent option if you’re seeking an e-commerce development company to assist you with the development of a mobile app. Our skilled development team is here to assist you with any of your needs.
So why are you being so circumspect?
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