How to Improve Shopify Speed Optimization?

Getting started with Shopify speed optimization

Nowadays, almost all market uses the different eCommerce platforms for their business, in particular Shopify store. In the pursuit of customers, stores try to attract the attention of users in all available ways. So many sites these days are getting sluggish - huge images, slow load times, pages that are unusable until a custom web font has downloaded. In the context of eCommerce, site performance is now actually more important than ever. As more and more businesses move online, consumers have more choice about where to spend their money, and their patience for less-than-optimal purchasing experiences decreases.

The secret is simple: the faster your Shopify store is loaded, the more customers you will receive. In this case, you need to speed up Shopify store. This paper will help you to learn how to measure, analyze and then improve the page speed of your Shopify store.

Have you read "10 Ways of copywriting", "5 Secrets of delicious soup" and " 7 Lifehacks of time management"? Are you tired of seeing these types of articles? Excellent! This paper will not let you died of boredom. If the load time speed of the Shopify store is more than eight seconds on a smartphone, we guarantee that sales on this website are not super. One second – ONE – could be costing you big money. That one second costs you traffic, sales, and can damage your reputation. But the question remains: How to speed up Shopify store?

Metrics

Fast sites get more traffic love from search engines. Slower sites get a lower rank, and it doesn’t take much of a fall to hurt traffic. We need to know what we will optimize! Let's define the metrics on which we can rely. This is due to the fact that a normal modern person’s pace of life is fundamentally different from the pace of human life at the beginning of the last century. Now, information is more readily available - and even more quickly available than the brain can process it. We have become impatient, and our focus and attention are scattered, meaning websites should reveal their content as quickly as possible.

Before you start Shopify speed optimization you have to analyze the load time of Shopify store.

Analysis

Our goal is to keep the user engaged with the page and deliver the optimal experience, regardless of device or type of network. It’s not so important to spend a lot of time deciding which tool - it’s just important to have a tool. Pick one that you’re comfortable with or have easy access to (PageSpeed insights is easy to get started with, especially as it comes integrated into Chrome).

A traditional service that analyzes the load speed of websites is Google PageSpeed Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/. Simply add your website and wait until the data is displayed. PageSpeed Insights is the service which reports on the real-world performance of the mobile page and desktop devices, provides suggestions on how that page may be improved.

Simply add your website and wait until the data is displayed. For each of the URL of your landing pages, you will get the Page Speed scores for the desktop as well as for mobile devices as shown below:

You received a list of recommendations:

• Remove the JavaScript and CSS code that blocks the top of the page (Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content). You need to collect all the Shopify theme styles in one file, and then minimize* them. The same must be done with scripts. Google recommends uploading styles to the inline page. This topic is covered in greater detail below.
• Leverage browser caching. Google insists that you specify the date or expiration date of static resources in the HTTP headers. But Shopify doesn’t give access to the back-end, so this item cannot be executed.
• Minify JavaScript. This topic is covered in greater detail, below.  Let's just say that optimizing images can reduce the weight of your page by 10-50%.
• Enable compression. You need to enable gzip compression. By default, each Shopify store already has compression.
• Reduce server response time. It does not make sense to optimize this area, as Shopify gives each store CDN, and their servers have high response rates.

As you can see, some of the items have already been completed for you. You only need to execute three of them: minimized styles and scripts, inline styles and images optimization.

Scripts and styles

We recommend customizing the assembly in the Gulp. If you can not do this, we suggest you contact a qualified Shopify developer.We collect and minify the styles. You can face the fact that some styles have .liquid file extensions, due to the fact that liquid variables are used in this style, which is taken from the admin panel of the store. They often refer to font type, size and color. You can safely make them static by copying the values from the admin panel to the style file.

The next step is the inline styles.

You create the liquid snippet - critical-styles.liquid - in which you place the tag <style></style>, inside of which you insert the collected and minimized styles.Connect the snippet through {% include ‘critical-styles’ %} in tag <head>. You’ll need to compile scripts into one file, minimize, and then connect to the bottom of the page, before the closing </body>. All this is also done through Gulp.

Tracking the process of page loading

After optimizing scripts and styles you may speed up the load time of Shopify store.

We take the service of webpagetest.org as a basis. WebPagetest is an open source project that is primarily being developed and supported by Google as part of our efforts to make the web faster. Enter the address of your site and wait for the results.

Select the Details tab. Here, you will see the page loading process, file by file. Notice the red color of the table row. This means that this file or resource is not loaded, and you need to fix this. It may be a picture which no longer exists but, in the code, it has not yet been removed. This can be removed, and so can the service statistics which, in principle, you do not need; you can delete or restore these. On the Content breakdown tab, you can see the weight diagram of your page. Pay attention to the ratio. For a typical Shopify store, the weight of the images should be greater than the weight of the scripts and styles. If your scripts weigh more than pictures, then either you have a web application with sophisticated functionality, or your website is "overgrown" with libraries that may not be used at all.

If you want to improve the speed of your Shopify store then you can not do without optimizing Shopify page loading speed.

Image optimization

Images are the most important content for any e-commerce store. There is no way you can compromise with the quality of the images but you also need to limit the sizes of the pages.

Google PageSpeed Insights have already given you links to a list of images that are not optimized. We cast them all in https://tinypng.com/. TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colors in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size! Try downloading and uploading them back to your website.

Unfortunately, not all pictures are available to you. Some pictures can be located on the application server that you are using and, therefore, optimizing them will not be successful. In addition, you can use the services at webpagetest.org, which we have pointed out above. On the Image Analysis tab, you will be prompted to see how much you can reduce the size of specific images, and in which formats you can convert images. The page loading optimization is a continuous process. You need to regularly check the pages speed scores and note them to keep track of your page's performance. Get your hands dirty with the low hanging fruits first and then focus on other issues.

We believe that this article has described the process of Shopify speed optimization as fully as possible. Till now we have discussed the things you can manage to speed up your Shopify website. For you will be child's play. But there are few page issues which you can’t fix until you are a seasoned Shopify developer. Makebecool team will be happy to help your website achieve space download speeds and increase your sales!