It is essential for ecommerce businesses to optimise their search engine ranking, speed up their pages, and enhance their site performance. Smartphones are becoming increasingly popular for visiting websites and making purchases, and users expect websites to load instantaneously after clicking a link. To ensure the best user experience that gets your visitors converting, scan through our need for speed guide to find the best tips and recommendations.
The Need for Speed
Here is our how-to guide in gaining speedy optimisation in your Shopify store.
Optimising Images
Having a clear understanding of how to optimise images can result in huge benefits, including reducing the load time of your website, enhancing your brand, and projecting a clear brand identity. Compressing images used throughout your website is the fastest way to improve site speed, Shopify supports many formats including JPEG, JPG Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF. The image optimisation process aims to create a file size that is as small as possible while maintaining high image quality.
In order to speed up your process, you can use online tools like JPEGmini or free alternatives on the web to reduce the size of your photos without affecting the image quality. This can be an easy and quick fix to replace your photos with optimised versions to speed up the site. Images are usually sized according to their dimensions and quality, which is why it is generally best to upload images that are exactly the size required for that particular page. Video length should also be limited on Shopify in order to speed up the site, unless it adds significant value to the user.
Use of Shopify Apps
Reducing the number of apps on your Shopify site comes next on our list of how to speed up your Shopify store. Running a Shopify store requires you to use a number of third-party apps, many of which are not contributing directly to improve the user experience. There is one major drawback to these apps: many run scripts on web pages that continue to run the JavaScript/CSS files in the background, when not in use, which slows down Shopify pages and overall site performance. Uninstalling an app won't completely remove it. Once an app is installed, it adds its own code to the website, so it has to be manually removed. Opt instead for Shopify apps that add the most value to your customer's journey.
Consider Professional Help
It's time for Shopify developers to fix a few things: When speed problems become more complex, it may be better to hire professionals than to try to solve the issues on our own. Often issues with batches of JS and CSS code can slow down the load speed of JavaScript/CSS-heavy websites and even cause pages not to render. To fix this issue, the page needs to load scripts according to their priority on the web page so that the JS scripts and CSS take precedence before loading the rest of the HTML.
It is common for a website to load multiple files which are loaded with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. It is common for these files to contain lines of text including spaces, comments, block delimiters, etc. This results in a longer loading time for the page as a result. The HTML code as well as any inline JavaScript and CSS should be compressed. In this way, data is saved and loading times are sped up. It is generally advisable to seek professional help with this.
Your online store may benefit from some of these methods more than others, so it's worth trying them all out to see which one works best for you. In the end, building a fast website isn't easy, so don’t be afraid to experiment, set realistic goals and seek professional help where needed.
Looking for a professional to help assist with your site? Then why not get in touch with us here.