How Your Shopify Themes Can Affect Your Store’s Speed

So, you want a quick and easy experience for your customers. What business owner doesn’t want that for their customers? One of the biggest components of customer experience on an eCommerce storefront is the speed of the website. If it’s taking too long for your customer to get the product that they want from your store, chances are they might turn to one of your competitors. We have all been there when a web page was taking too long, so we gave up and turned to a different one. This is where your Shopify themes come into play. First of all, what can affect the speed of your Shopify store? One way is how effectively and efficiently you’re using and optimizing your Shopify themes. Another way is through your bandwidth, which is essentially the amount of data that can be transferred to a server at one time. So, how does this affect your store? Whenever a customer is viewing a page in your store, or any web page in general, their browser automatically downloads the information from photos or images, which requires bandwidth. If you have larger or more complex image files, it requires more bandwidth for the customer’s web browser to download. And the more your Shopify company grows, and the more customers are visiting your site, the greater amount of bandwidth is needed because more is being used. However, for a Shopify merchant, you don’t have to worry about being charged. Shopify provides unlimited bandwidth for all of its merchants, regardless of how much traffic you have coming to your store. Easy Ways to Optimize Your eCommerce Store For Better Speed Well, there are several ways in which you can optimize your eCommerce site for speed. But before you get to optimizing your Shopify themes for speed, you should find some tools that will help you find out what’s slowing you down. Online tools like PageSpeed Insights, YSlow, and WebPageTest.org, are all great to help you determine what you need to change. Then you’re all ready for optimizing your Shopify themes! First of all, you need to make sure you are using the right platform. That’s where Shopify comes in! Shopify ensures a site design that takes into account website structure and user-friendly design to optimize the speed of your site. Secondly, you should pay attention to the CDN that your hosting platform uses. Shopify is the best out there for a reason. Shopify partnered with Fastly for their content delivery network (CDN) that uses tens of thousands of global servers that are proven to boost eCommerce speed, which in turn increases sales. One way to use your Shopify themes more efficiently is by taking care when selecting your images, as well as compressing your images. Information from images can be an enormous strain on bandwidth usage, particularly for large or complex files. First of all, you need to make sure you are selecting the best file type. The most common file types that support quality compression are .jpg and .gif, but avoid .bmp or .tif files since they are larger in size and don’t compress as well. When you compress your images, it frees up storage and server space without losing the quality of the picture or the dimensions that you want. You can further optimize your Shopify themes by utilizing the Shopify Image Optimizer! An excellent way to optimize speed on your Shopify themes? Follow the adage, and decide that less is truly more. The simpler your theme, the faster your pages will load for your customer. This does more for your site than just making the pages load faster, it also makes it more usable and clearer to the customer’s when they are navigating your site. There are a couple of main ways to cut down on the excess in your Shopify themes. First, refactor and simplify your CSS. Second, kill carousels that load lots of high-resolution images. And third, use CSS for a background instead of uploading an image that will require more bandwidth. Another efficient way to increase speed on your Shopify themes is by reducing your flash and flash elements on your eCommerce site. Using flash on your storefront can be an excellent way to add interest and appeal, but it, unfortunately, creates a huge drag on your bandwidth use. However, when choosing appeal over function, your customers may be more likely to appreciate a fast site over a flash animation. A great substitution for flash animation is embedding a video into your storefront from a third-party site! While it will be shown through your Shopify themes, the bandwidth used will be provided by the video’s third-party host. Another tip is to download Shopify’s Speed Optimization Analyzer app! This app is intended to analyze every page of your Shopify theme and provide you with advanced tips for speed optimization and store performance. You will be provided with a variety of tips to choose from, with an accompanied ranking, so you know which tips will be more efficient at optimizing your Shopify themes than others. How 1 Digital Agency Can Help  Are you considering making changes to your eCommerce storefront, but not sure how it will affect your optimized Shopify themes and site speed? Then choose 1 Digital Agency to work with your business. 1 Digital Agency is considered an approved premier partner with Shopify. This means that not only are we a highly dependable and capable partner for Shopify merchants, but we also have the experience to handle whatever you need to be done. This is important because we can optimize your site’s design to handle your Shopify themes and site speed correctly and efficiently. Our Shopify services don’t begin and end with properly managing your eCommerce store’s Shopify themes. We specialize in the design and development of your eCommerce storefront, whether you are just starting out with your business or you’re looking to improve upon what you already have. Our team can also provide you with digital marketing services, including content creation, email and social media campaigns, product photography, and a comprehensive SEO campaign. If you have any questions about our services with Shopify, call us now at 888-982-8269 or contact us and find out more about how we can help your business!

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