The loading speed of your Shopify e-commerce site is an important factor to consider when creating or optimizing your Store.

If your store pages are too slow to load, it can discourage visitors coming to your site from staying. On average, the loading time of a web page should not exceed 3 seconds of loading otherwise you will start losing a large number of visitors.

In addition to the loss of visitors to your site, the loading time of a site is also taken into account by the Google algorithm to determine your positioning in the search results .

Between the potential loss of visitors and the impact on your site’s SEO, it is more than necessary that the loading speed of your Shopify Store be as low as possible. In this article, we will bring you the keys to improve the speed of your Shopify store through several tips.

Manage Shopify apps

The system of applications on Shopify is an indisputable advantage to be able to bring many functionalities to your store. There is a downside though: the more apps you have on your site, the more likely you are to encounter issues on your store.

These problems can be numerous, such as new bugs from installed applications, potential security vulnerabilities, but also an increase in the loading time of your site if one or more applications are poorly optimized or contain bugs.

If you find that an app increases the speed of your store, try to determine if it is due to a specific feature of the app or the entire app. Depending on the result of the analysis you will have, it is good practice to deactivate the functionality concerned or to delete the entire application if it is the latter which is in question.

Keep in mind that too many apps on your Shopify store can hurt your Shopify store, so it will be good for you and your store to find the best possible balance between the features that are essential to you and the speed of the store.

Be careful, sometimes even after uninstalling a Shopify application from your store, some code from it may remain in the code of your store.

In this case, try to find the code of the uninstalled app to remove it by yourself. This manipulation requires caution, because deleting the wrong code can cause bugs on your store, or even make it inaccessible.

Applications that provide functionality only on the administrator interface and not on your store itself will not influence the loading speed of your store.

It will therefore not be necessary to uninstall them to improve the speed of your store.

Choosing the right theme and optimizing it

One of the most important points in optimizing the speed of a Shopify store is its theme .

Indeed, the theme you choose will have a great impact on the loading speed of your pages.

Before optimizing a theme, it is essential to choose a good theme that will meet the needs of your store in terms of aesthetics and functionality, but also that will be designed in the best way so that it has the lowest weight and make as few requests as possible.

The themes offered by Shopify will generally be good choices, however if you want to choose a theme from an independent developer or company, you will need to do some research before choosing a theme.

When you have found a theme that suits you, you can test its optimization thanks to the demo that most themes offer and to an analysis site such as GTMetrix which will give you data on the optimization of the theme: its weight, its number of requests, etc.

Choose a theme that will have a low weight and a low number of requests, in a more general case, you can use the score given by the GTMetrix, “A” being the best.

Then when you have chosen, installed and configured the theme on your Shopify store, you can optimize it by performing a few manipulations.

1. Disable Unused Features

As a first step and if you have the possibility, deactivate all the features provided with the theme and which you will not need.

2. Minify and Compress Resources

If you don’t know what file minification and compression are, these are two techniques that can save you a lot of loading speed on your store.

Without going into too much detail, minifying and compressing your CSS and JavaScript files will reduce their size by optimizing the code written in the files.

It is possible to perform these two actions manually, but it requires advanced technical knowledge.

The easiest way is to install a file optimization application such as “ Page Speed ​​Optimizer: PI Speed  ” or “  Hyperspeed: Extreme Page Speed  ” which will automatically optimize your website, including CSS and JavaScript files, by compressing them and minimizing them.

3. Optimize images

The last advice we have to give you to optimize your theme and shop in general will be to optimize the images on your shop.

If you have a theme with images included by default, but also you have added images to your store, which is very likely in the latter case, you will need to optimize all of these images.

To optimize your images, the two main actions to perform will be to compress your images and reduce their dimensions. You can do this manually using software such as Photoshop or online through free sites like Pixlr or ILoveImg .

If you want to delegate this task to a Shopify application then no worries there are several offering you to optimize the images of your site. The two applications that we proposed to you in the previous point, namely “Hyperspeed” and “PI Speed” will successfully accomplish this task.

However, if you want a specialized application dedicated solely to optimizing your images, you can turn to applications such as  TinyIMG , Image Optimizer or Crush.pics – SEO Compression .

Reduce the number of elements on pages

We come to the last point to improve the loading speed of your Shopify store. This last good practice to implement is to reduce the number of elements appearing on the pages of your website.

The most important thing will be to minimize the number of pop-ups that will appear on your Shopify site when someone accesses a page on your store.

Apart from increasing a page’s load time, pop-ups significantly reduce the user experience. They block access to your site and can sometimes put off visitors from continuing to browse your site.

Any pop-up added to your store must be justified by an essential need, if a pop-up is not essential, then you should remove it.

In a more general case, if you add too many elements to a web page, it will take longer to load. In addition to pop-ups, you will need to minimize the elements on the same page.

Let’s take for example a collection page of your Shopify store, instead of displaying 50 products by default, consider displaying only 25 and offering a “See more” button.

This same logic can apply to your Shopify site’s blog where you can display fewer posts by default.

Conclusion

Improving the speed of your store involves optimizing several elements of your store, whether it is the theme, the applications or the very construction of your pages. You will need to put in place several best practices to see a change in the speed of your store. your site.

From the tips given in this article, you can start optimizing your Shopify store and watch its loading time get reduced.

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