A slow Shopify store can be a real conversion killer. Numerous studies have shown that even a one-second delay in page load time can result in a 7% decrease in conversion rates. Yikes! So, how can you keep your Shopify store running at lightning speed?! Here are five tips for you to look at.
1. Choose a fast theme
This is the most important investment that you can make for your Shopify store’s success because not all Shopify themes are created equal. Some themes are simply better throughout and much faster than others.
When choosing a theme, be sure to test the theme's speed on a tool like Google’s PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix. While you shouldn’t fully rely on this tool as they are guideline, they offer a good insight on some of the theme’s issues.
If you are a developer (or know one), of course checking the “Network” tab in the Developers’ tools can yield some very interesting insights too.
The third option and the simple one, is just checking the theme’s demo on yourself, Hitting Hard Refresh on Chrome can give you a good sense of how fast the theme is.
2. Optimize your images
Let us be very clear here, there is nothing you need to do about this point, except provide professional and high-quality images.
Well, then why is this point on the list, you may ask? That’s because we see lots of wasted energy from many Shopify store owners trying to crop or resize their products or other promotional images. Unless you are using a very old or poorly developed Shopify theme, that job is already taken care of for you. Shopify will crop and optimize all your store’s images according to the format specified by the theme, including different sizes for mobile/desktop.
Heads up: Do not fully trust the responses from AI tools. Mostly they are general and very broad responses. For example. Google’s Bard (ChatGPT competitor) gave this point as the first one, telling us to crop images using a tool like TinyPNG, which might be good for a general website, but not for Shopify.
3. Delete unused apps:
Every app you install on your Shopify store loads code to your store, which can slow it down. Make sure to delete any apps that you're not using, but we strongly recommend that you limit as much as you can the their number as well. Only use the apps that are vital to your store’s success. We know that they are convenient in many cases, but you don’t want to risk the page speed performance because as we mentioned above, it directly affects your store’s conversion rates.
4. Limit the number of sections and blocks
Especially on the homepage, which is the first route that usually your customers will land on. While you want to inform your customers about the benefits of your awesome products and also give them some social proof, you shouldn’t have more than 10 sections enabled on the homepage and even fewer on the product and collection pages.
Remember the goal of the homepage is to quickly inform your customers of what you sell, and how other customers are happy about it and immediately redirect them either to the collection pages or better yet, directly on the product page. We all know that the attention span of a website’s visitors nowadays is as low as it gets, so funnel as much as possible and as quickly as possible.
5. Should I hire a professional developer?
Of course, if you have excess in your budget and every fraction of improvement in the CVR (conversion rates) percentage can yield thousands of dollars in revenue, you should hire a professional, or a team for that matter, of developers to constantly improve and work on your Shopify store. If you are just getting started on your e-commerce journey, we would recommend that you think from a minimalist mindset, which is to simplify as much as possible, while investing in a professional-made Shopify theme, which will solve almost every worry that you might have on this topic.
Bonus Tip: Continuously improve your store’s performance.
Improving your store’s loading time and performance should be an ongoing process Because every tiny improvement you make, compounds the overall experience, and as a result, you will achieve better conversion rates. Make sure to check out the official Shopify guidelines and recommendations and view some YouTube videos as well