Improving your store’s speed can do wonders for your conversion rate.
From the initial loading time, to the speed of checking out, it’s important to optimize all areas of your store’s speed.
Let’s take a look at a few common errors and how you can speed up your store and convert more users.
Unused Code
Unused code is a massive reason why a lot of stores load very slowly.
This code doesn’t have to be code you’ve written yourself, it often can come from third party tools.
This is why it’s important to regularly review the apps you have installed on your store and remove ones that you no longer use.
The fewer requests your store makes, the faster it loads.
Unused code can also come from your theme directly.
A lot of themes may include CSS for specific features that you may not use; however, the code is still loaded.
It can be beneficial for a developer to do an audit of your store and remove all redundant code, thus speeding up your store.
Features
Using a heatmap tool or potential data collected through analytics, you can view how useful certain features are to your store.
If users are never using a specific feature, it can help to deactivate the feature and reduce your code’s size.
With this in mind, it’s important to consider that having a lot of complicated features can hurt your site’s speed; maintaining a balance is crucial.
Images
Images can be quite large, thus slowing down your site speed.
We’re not saying not to use images, however, it’s important to compress the images you’re using as well as defer off-screen images from loading until they’re in view.
Shopify does have some existing safeguards to prevent you from overloading your store, such as restricting how many products you can show on a collection page at once, this limits the amount of image requests made at once.
However, it’s best to review the images you’re using and ensure they’re well optimized to ensure your store’s speed is not poorly affected.
Testing The Speed
There are plenty of ways to test your online store’s speed.
There are online speed testing tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
There are also tools like Shopify’s Theme Inspector, linked here.
While these tools provide valuable insights, it can be hard to actually solve the issues that they uncover, if you’re not a developer.
This is where an experienced developer can help by diving into your Shopify theme and making the necessary changes from data-based insights.
Our team has extensive experience improving clients’ loading speeds; let’s have a chat and see how we can help optimize your store.
