Speed is a crucial factor in how efficiently your Shopify store converts visitors into paying customers.
The main reason customers have wholeheartedly adapted to online shopping is because of the convenience and the speed it offers, as compared to physical shopping. If their experience in your Shopify store is slow, there will be fewer conversions to sales.
Most statistics on the web show that you risk losing 40% of your visitor traffic if it takes longer than 3 seconds for your website to load.
A Shopify development agency starts building your website considering a certain number of visitors and transactions. A surge in traffic that exceeds this range can disrupt your speed and performance, as well as your brand experience.
When Google undertook a mobile page speed study, they found out that for every second it takes longer for a webpage to load, there is an almost exponential increase in visitor bounce rates. That is also why the search engine has prioritized strong web core vitals, including the site performance in its recent updates.
Especially in eCommerce, page speed plays an even more important role. Slow-loading websites hinder conversions by negatively impacting the buyer experience.
At ThinkTanker, we don’t just offer Shopify development services. From the initial discussion itself, we focus on all aspects of how your website is going to look and perform. This includes Shopify speed optimization techniques that will drive more conversions for your store.
But if you want to hire Shopify developers or do it yourself, here are some of the most important ways in which you can achieve higher conversions:
Leverage CDN – Content Delivery Network
Shopify offers a specialized group of servers across the world, which distributes the content delivery load by utilizing whichever server is closest to your visitors. This helps you offer a great experience to potential buyers, no matter where they are in the world.
Shopify’s CDN is offered at no extra cost to you but ensures that you can deliver static and event-driven content wherever your visitors are. Make sure that you discuss this feature with your Shopify development agency before you start building your online store.
Streamline your website with Google Tag Manager
Usually, an eCommerce development company would use JavaScript tracking tags for various purposes such as general analytics, conversions, goals, and behavioral retargeting. These tags collect data from visitors and customers to help you choose the right marketing strategies to grow your store.
But collecting all that data by employing different trackers also slows down your website performance. Even if you want to improve or change your tags, later on, you will probably have to hire Shopify developers separately which will add to your costs.
You can instead choose to opt for a comprehensive TMS (Tag Management System) to group all the tags into a single request. Google Tag Manager is a great example of how to simplify your data collection process without hindering your website loading time.
Google Tag Manager also loads all external tags in your website asynchronously, which means that it occurs in the background without affecting the rest of your website elements.
Keep your website simple
The general rule of thumb for a Shopify development company is to keep the number of clicks required to reach any page on your site from the homepage below four. This is important not only for your customers but also for the search engine crawlers that can index all your web pages.
Discuss with your website app development company beforehand the theme that will be used to build your website. You can check the speed of a live preview of the theme with speed checker tools, and then your team must optimize it to make it faster.
Use compressed images for your website to optimize your Shopify store speed. There are a variety of third-party tools which can easily compress your images without harming the picture quality.
Ecommerce stores do require a lot of images and other visual elements, such as pop-ups, to entice visitors. But each extra element will add to your page loading speed, so it is advisable to choose them carefully and deploy them sparingly.
Check redirects and broken links
Links that you have forgotten but remain on the website are very harmful for your website speed and SEO. Not only your visitors’ user experience but also your visibility on search engines is hindered with unnecessary redirects, as it increases the number of your HTTP requests too.
Shopify offers an inbuilt redirect option, or a cacheable redirect from the navigation panel itself, so a different page. Especially with 302 redirects, which happens when a page has been moved temporarily, you can send the visitor to a related page without affecting their performance.
Similarly with broken links for page elements such as images, CSS, and JS files also increase your HTTP requests unnecessarily. A simply broken link checker can help you identify and eliminate them from your websites. Instead, include custom 404 error pages can be used for visitors who may enter incorrect URLs.
Prioritize for mobile buyers
Most buyers nowadays browse and shop on their mobile phones, and this number is only growing. Shopify is designed to provide great mobile-first experiences.
You can use page speed measurement tools that focus on how the mobile shop experience in your store can be improved, by identifying elements that affect it. Different tools use different scoring techniques so make sure you prioritize as per your brand requirements after analyzing their reports.
CONCLUSION
Shopify speed optimization is a continuous process, depending on a lot of factors. Nor will it always have an immediate effect. Even if you hire Shopify developers to build your site, you must be aware of the need for optimization and the best practices that will boost sales.
It is about ensuring a great customer experience when they visit your store. Prospective buyers expect quick processes to get what they want, and delays will mean losing their business in the future too.
So, consider each of the optimization tricks we have shared with you to measure how your website holds up, and make the necessary changes to ensure better conversions on your Shopify store.
