Starting from the 1st of July Google announced that page speed will be a ranking factor for searches. The fact that Google cares about the speed, it is just the right time to start considering making your Shopify store faster and taking advantage of this information among the first ones. When it comes to speed, there are many factors affecting it. Anyway, most of them are in connection with Shopify as an e-commerce platform. In addition, there are some changes merchants can do to optimize speed and try to keep forward with ranking factor trends in 2019. 

In this article, we will talk about the 5 different ways you can take to improve Shopify store performance and still make the store loading a lot faster.

Deal with the images 

When it comes to beautiful shops, they are all colorful, interactive, with a lot of images showing their products and following their branding. Even though images can help you with sales, it can be a bit tricky if they don’t render properly and annoy your possible customers. It may happen they get so annoyed, they actually leave your shop and go to a competitor one. But, we can’t delete them, shop without images would be certainly not so much interesting! Instead, before uploading, there are 3 different options you can use to prevent images from not loading or slowing down your website

Resolution change

Try to reduce the “quality” of the image (and thereby the file size)

Crop

You are cutting out unneeded areas and therefore make the image size smaller 

Compress

With compressing you increase the efficiency of image data storage

There are numerous tools like ResizeImage which can easily help you with any of these options.

Minify CSS and javascript

Tools like Minifier or MinifyCode can help you optimize your store and make it performant, without affecting the operation of the code. These tools are useful as they do things like removing white space and comments, removing non-required semicolons, etc. Minification process can reduce 10% – 95% the size of the code.

Use AMP for fast Shopify pages

AMP is a web component framework developed by Google. Accelerated Mobile Pages optimizes the performance of Shopify stores on mobile phones and lets the pages having videos, images, animations or rich content to load instantly, no matter what type of device customers are using. Having AMP pages regarding regular ones acquires more customers cause besides speed, they are noticeable thanks to lightning bolt next to them. Thanks to the AMP app on the Shopify store, you can make your store faster without any coding.

Eliminate apps that are not used

This can be especially useful with Shopify sites with many products and orders, as well as any other e-commerce store. In Shopify, there can be a problem in numerous apps shops don’t even use or forget having them installed. The main way to clean so-called “baggage” is to go in every so often and do a manual overhaul. Also, remove any unnecessary external scripts, as they can make your site slower in time without you noticing it.

Use cashing options

Caching is a way of temporarily storing the contents of a Shopify store in locations closer to the user, similar to the way human memory works. It affects content downloads and helps deliver a more satisfying user experience. When a user visits a site for the first time, the certain files are stored and caching allows these saved items to be served immediately upon the user’s next visit, rather than requiring new requests to be sent back to the origin server which slows down your page loading speed. One of the reasons PWA is the “new thing” everyone is talking about is cause PWA upgraded sites load a lot faster thanks to Service Workers. They can take control over network requests, modify them and serve custom responses retrieved from the cache. You can read more about PWA here.

Start now

Even though you may have not been thinking the speed matters, it actually does. According to some estimates, almost $500 billion in e-commerce revenue disappears thanks to slow loading. As speed is now more important, the damage is even worse. Investing in a fast site is investing in user experience and business success which eventually leads to happier customers and more revenue for Shopify business owners.