When you have an online store, making sure your website loads quickly is essential. The slower your site loads, the more orders you will lose out on. To increase your sales, traffic, and search engine rankings, you will want to increase Shopify site speed.

Thankfully, Shopify is an excellent platform to build an e-commerce business on. The ease of launching your store, managing it, and making sales has led to it being used by nearly a million merchants. As great as Shopify is, you will need to optimize it to reduce bounce rates, increase engagement, and land more sales. The secret lies in boosting your site’s speed.

Here are some of the best ways to increase Shopify site speed and reap the benefits of doing so.

1. Optimize Images

Optimizing the images on your site will translate into the pages they are on to load much faster. The way to optimize images is to compress images. This process reduces the original file size while keeping the image quality untouched.

When it comes to compressing images, there are two different ways to do it: lossless and lossy compression. With lossless compression, you reduce the file size of an image without sacrificing quality. With lossy compression, the file size also becomes reduced but image quality takes a hit. Obviously, lossless image compression would be preferred. This is an especially popular option when images are smaller.

Shopify lets you upload images that are in jpg (jpeg, jpg, and progressive jpeg), png, and gif formats. Both gif and png files usually take up more space than jpg file types, which is something to consider. For any of the images you want to compress, you can use the handy TinyPNG online tool.

2. Switch to a Responsive Theme

Not all Shopify themes will be optimized for speed. Some get bogged down with numerous bells and whistles that lengthen site load times, especially on mobile devices. Around half of all web traffic is mobile, which means your site should be optimized to load quickly for shoppers using their smartphones.

A responsive theme has been optimized out of the box to load fast and effectively on mobile devices. These themes will also be modified to look better and more minimalist, which helps reduce load times.

3. Remove Unused Store Apps

You may have apps in your Shopify store that are going unused and needlessly slowing your site down. To see what apps you have running, head over to the admin section of your store and get rid of any that you do not need. The fewer apps you have running, the faster your site will load for shoppers.

4. Cut Down on HTTP Requests

Whenever someone visits your website, their browser will load numerous files that are on your site, including CSS stylesheets, scripts, images, and more. Each file has its own request, called an HTTP request. The more of these requests there are, the lengthier your site’s load time will become.

There are many ways to cut down on HTTP requests. Some of them include:

• Combining and inlining CSS scripts
• Combining and inlining JavaScripts
• Reducing the amount of Shopify apps
• Removing unused social media buttons
• Using a Content Delivery Network

5. Eliminating Broken Links

Broken links are the kind of links that go to a page that no longer exists. The last thing you want is to take visitors to your store to a page that no longer works. They will be more likely to leave and go to another store’s site that has a working page.

Something else you may want to consider eliminating are redirects that prolong the path a shopper takes to get to a product. This means placing additional pages between their entry to your website and the page they want to view. The longer a shopper needs to spend looking for something on your site, the more time they are spending doing so, which can dissuade them. Shopify’s app store has a number of apps that can help you locate broken links and unnecessary redirects and quickly resolve them.

6. Remove Image Sliders

Image sliders may seem fun and able to show off products you sell. However, they are generally going to needlessly slow your site down. Most people will never click on any image beyond the first one in a slider. They also are not going to patiently wait for the upcoming images to show up. Also, every image will increase the site’s load time, adding bloat to your site. Finally, mobile devices will not display image sliders that well sometimes, making it more of a hindrance than a helpful aid.

7. Enable Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a feature that you can enable on your Shopify store that can dramatically increase Shopify site speed. The way it works is that anything that is generally below what you see on the screen (above ‘the fold’) will not load until you scroll down the page.

The great thing about lazy loading is that you can have more images or content on your site lower on the page. Your site will not load everything on the page at once. Only the elements that are needed to load for what is showing on the screen will be loaded.

Increase Your Shopify Site Speed

These seven ways to increase Shopify site speed will significantly reduce load times and improve user experience. This also leads to more traffic and higher rankings on search engines like Google, which ultimately gets you more sales.

Ebiz Experts can help you optimize your Shopify store and make it look as best as it can. Whether you need help with your Shopify store’s web design, marketing, or optimization, you can get rid of most of the hassle that comes with being an e-commerce entrepreneur. If you’re worried that you are losing customers and sales due to your store’s site loading slow, contact us today! We look forward to helping you.