Supercharge Your Shopify Site: A Guide To Boosting Speed And Performance

Is it possible to speed up your Shopify? Expert Tony Wright answers this week's Ask An SEO question.

This week's Ask a Question About SEO comes from Momina in Dallas, who asks:

"How can we improve page speed and page experience for our Shopify store? Shopify won't let us make code changes. How can we stay on top of updating Google's page experience?"

Speed is a crucial element that can have a big impact on user experience, search engine rankings, and conversions when running a successful Shopify store.

Optimize your site for faster loading times and a better customer journey with actionable strategies and practical tips.

Choose the best theme for speed.

Choosing a fast and reliable theme is the foundation of a high-performing Shopify website.

It's crucial to select a thin, well-coded theme from the Shopify Theme Store.

Avoid themes with excessive features or complex functionality that can slow down your site. Prioritize simplicity and clean code to ensure maximum speed and performance.

Image Optimization power

Images play an important role in attracting and engaging visitors, but they can also be a major factor in slowing down your site.

Optimize your product images without compromising quality.

Use image compression tools like TinyPNG or Shopify apps like Crush.pics to reduce file size while maintaining visual appeal.

You can dramatically improve your site's loading times by properly compressing and formatting your images.

Simplify applications for speed

Apps can improve the functionality of your Shopify site, but it's important to keep in mind their impact on speed.

Keeping the number of installed apps to a minimum is great practice.

Each application adds extra code and can slow down your site. Review your apps list regularly and remove any unused or redundant apps.

Additionally, you can improve the performance of your chosen apps by contacting their developers for guidance.

Open the possibility of caching

Caching is a powerful technology that can significantly increase your site speed.

Caching must be enabled in your Shopify settings.

By caching your content, you can cache and serve it to viewers more efficiently, reducing server load and improving loading times.

Consider implementing a content delivery network (CDN) to store your content on servers closer to your site visitors and improve site performance.

Improved JavaScript and CSS

JavaScript and CSS files can contribute to slow loading times if not properly optimized.

You can speed up your site by minifying these files by removing unnecessary code, whitespace, and comments.

Minification reduces the file size, allowing for faster delivery to your site visitors' browsers.

By optimizing JavaScript and CSS, you can simplify the rendering process and improve the overall speed of the site.

Minimize redirects for a seamless experience

Excessive redirects can slow down your site and frustrate users.

It is recommended to reduce the number of redirects by updating your links and fixing broken links.

Reducing unnecessary redirects improves loading times and improves the overall user experience, making navigation smoother and more efficient.

Prioritize content above the fold.

First impressions are important, especially when it comes to site speed.

It's important to prioritize content above the fold, which is the area of the web page that is visible without having to scroll.

By loading important content, such as product images and descriptions, above the fold, you ensure that visitors see the most important elements first while the rest of the page loads.

This technology increases perceived speed and keeps visitors engaged.

Implement lazy media loading

Media elements such as images and videos can significantly impact loading times, especially on pages with rich visual content.

I recommend implementing lazy loading, a technique that delays loading of non-visible media until users scroll to it.

By implementing lazy loading, you can reduce the initial loading time of your pages, with faster rendering and a smoother user experience.

A result

It's possible to speed up your Shopify site, even if you can't touch the code.

The most important thing is to keep your Shopify site flexible and clean.

Of course, if you can't get Shopify's site speed up to your standards, you can always build a WordPress front-end and use Shopify for the e-commerce portions of your site.

But maybe that's another column.