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How to Increase Website Speed on Shopify

How to Increase Website Speed on Shopify

March 26, 2021

How to Increase Website Speed on Shopify


Hello, hello. You're about to learn how to increase website speed on Shopify. 



All right guys, before we get started, I just want to say welcome to everyone new. My name is Christian Piñon. I am the co-founder of BitBranding, your number one resource for e-commerce knowledge. 



Today, we're going to cover how to increase website speed on Shopify. This is the fourth step optimization of the Ecomm Accelerator Process. 



This is incredibly crucial because most store owners don't even pay attention to how quickly their website actually loads, and when they actually figure out it's slow as a turtle, then they get frustrated, a.k.a. they're a frustrated store owner. 



They seek out for help and they get 10 different solutions not knowing what to do. That may be exactly what you're doing right now. You're looking out for a solution. So we want to show you how to make sure that your customers have a zippy experience in your Shopify store. 


Test Your Website Speed


First things first, run your website through some tests to see the problem areas. 



You can go to GTmetrix or Google Page Speed Tests and you can quickly see what are your actual problematic areas.




They both have free options and paid options. 



So you actually can delve deeper into what it is exactly that you need help with as far as, you know, when it comes to your website speed. From there, then you can actually give this to a developer.



Some of those things are going to be very hard to understand or very hard for you to do on your own. But it's good to have that base metric on where you're starting at when it comes to websites. 


Choose A Theme


The second thing that you can do is you just need to have the right theme. 



Shopify is all about having the right theme.



Try not to purchase themes from third party providers that have not been vetted by Shopify. Yes, they may provide maybe additional features. They may provide things that the Shopify themes don't provide, but at the same time, they're not vetted by Shopify. So a lot of times they could become very bloated with code or not have best practices when it comes to Shopify themes. 



So it's always important to stay with the Shopify App Store and just get your themes from there and you can also pick themes based on the speed of them. So you can actually pick certain themes that align with the speed of the website and that's very, very important.


Use Correct Image Sizes


Third thing you can do is compress images. This is a must. You need to make sure that your images are loading quickly.




Images are the cornerstone of your website, essentially. Right? This makes or breaks your website. If your images are huge, then they're just not going to load quickly. So you have to understand that your images; they need to be compressed into smaller sizes. It doesn't have to necessarily do with the dimensions of the pictures. It has to do with the size of the image. 




So you think about your typical iPhone picture. I believe it's two to three megabytes versus on your website you wanted to have around 200 kilobytes. So that's a huge difference right there. If you're taking product pictures on your iPhone and uploading directly to Shopify, you're going to have problems with load times when it comes to people who are loading your site on mobile and maybe if they have a 3G connection, that makes it even longer, right, for them to load those images.



So, you either get an app that does this for you automatically or have some sort of process in place that allows you to, maybe using Photoshop, to quickly compress some of those images into something more usable for the Web and we actually made a video on exactly how to do this. If you want, you can check it out here.


Don’t Go Crazy With Apps


The fourth thing you can do here is reduce the number of apps. 



This one's kind of tricky because you definitely want some of these apps because of their features. But once you run those reports and that first step that we told you, some of the problematic areas might be the apps that you're running. 



Any time your website loads, it needs to load all these apps and these apps have codes that are usually on different servers. So your website has to ping those servers to get those apps to load on your website. 



So that's something to consider and it's kind of tricky sometimes because obviously you want those features, but you also don't want your website to lag too much. Again, the number one thing that we would recommend here is to look at your reports and see if the apps that you currently have are actually problematic because if they're not, then you kind of keep going.


But take this into consideration next time you're adding a new app or someone recommended that you add some kind of app for maybe a pinwheel to get a coupon or something.


Keep The Hero On Your Homepage Simple


The fifth thing here is try to avoid sliders.



Sliders are usually on the hero of the website, the homepage, the hero section, and you'll see a slider of different images in there. 




That's not really necessary. Less images, less bulk, so stick with one static image on your hero, your website, and that way you can avoid sliders, less images. It actually avoids a little bit less code, right? Because you don't have to worry about that automatic rotation of the slide. 


That's how you increase website speed on Shopify. But, if your store doesn't have an approved marketing strategy that brings the right customer, then a lot of this is just going to be pointless. Right? So that's why you should schedule a call today so we can show you step by step how to increase sales on Shopify and begin to be an impactful store owner.


If you enjoyed this information and found value in it, make sure to head over to our YouTube Channel, subscribe and hit the bell so that you don't miss out on any of the content we put out every single week to help you guys grow your business.



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