Merchants with a Shopify store can make the best of online business by simply boosting the website speed. It may sound highly technical and difficult but optimizing Shopify store speed is quite easy if you understand the basics. In this article, we will explain what site speed optimization actually is and how it matters.
Since the coronavirus pandemic, shoppers prefer to make purchases online with the comfort of their home. Many merchants set up their online stores to cash in on online selling. Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, online store can be run from space, no matter the size or location of your office. However, the easy access to sell online using e-commerce platforms like Shopify, merchants created a highly competitive market online.
How it Matters?
Here is when site speed matters. Shoppers have infinite options on the internet and if your online store responds slow, then they would choose an alternative. In research conducted by Digital.com, 53 percent of online shoppers expect a loading time of less than three seconds from online stores. The study further revealed that half of these shoppers would abandon cart after choosing what to buy if pages do not respond fast enough.
Apart from the user experience, a slow site speed also affects search engine optimization (SEO) and conversion rate.
What is Shopify Store Speed Optimisation?
It is a process of reducing the length of time a web page takes to load on your Shopify store. A web page can load as quickly as in seconds or fractions of seconds. The site speed depends on the following factors:
- Text format
- Image sizes
- Videos
- HTML scripts
When the shopper clicks on a product, your website server receives a bunch of HTTP requests and responds to each request by providing the appropriate element. Site speed is the time gap between the first click of user to the information displayed on Shopify store.
Since you now know the concept, it’s better to understand the complexities involved with protocols and delivery systems. Below are some most discussed factors that slows down your Shopify store:
- Content type and amount: Pages with less of visual content or with lower sizes of images and videos load faster on an online store.
- Internet connection: This is the issue from customer’s end as the problem is with the internet, the basic requirement to make online purchases.
- User device: Sometimes a user device, like a specific smart phone or laptop, creates a problem in loading pages faster.
- Operating system: This is another technical issue from the customer’s end. The operating system of a mobile phone or laptop also creates problem sometimes.
- Browser: Internet browser also decides the site speed as the HTTP requests sent by the customer get delayed by an older version of a browser.
In most of the cases, site speed is discussed from a user’s perspective, though they do not care about the reason and look for alternatives that load faster. Here is when you can take advantage of the competition by site speed optimization.
Three Tips to Improve Site Speed:
- Reduce the number of visual elements or reduce their sizes to help the page load faster.
- Make individual elements load faster
- Identify what your customers want and load those elements faster so that they see them quickly.
Read More: How to Improve Speed of Shopify Store
Importance of Site Speed Optimization
Impression on Visitors
A quicker site speed helps your brand leave a strong impression on first time visitors. Most of the shoppers avoid shopping from a slow responding website, considering it unsafe or not trustworthy. Digital.com’s study claims that 79 percent of shoppers leave website due to a slow speed.
A fast-loading site, on the other hand, gives visitors an impression of professionalism and they do not hesitate to make online transactions.
Conversion Rate
A slow-responding website dampens the conversion rate of your online business. Unbounce found in research that 70 percent of consumers make purchases on the basis of site speed. According to another research by Portent, an ideal website should take less than four seconds to load one single page. However, online stores with less than two seconds of site speed carry out the highest conversion rates.
The study further explains that every second of delay dampens conversion rates by 2.11 percent. The Shopify store with one second of site speed manages a conversion rate 2.5x higher than those with speed of five seconds.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that were not converted into customers. While factors like products type, website design and search efficiency also decide the bounce rate of an online store, slow speed also results in a higher bounce rate.
Online shopping consists of multiple steps that require a customer to visit a number of pages from product page to checkout. For websites with a higher bounce rate, it is obvious that the visitors do not wish to navigate from one page to another and lave for a better alternative.
The Digital.com study says online stores reduce the loading time to reduce the bounce rate. A Google research, quoted by thegood.com, adds: “the chance of a bounce increases by 32% when a page load time went from one to three seconds, and increases by 90% when the page load time went from one to five seconds. If a site takes 10 seconds to load, nearly everyone leaves.”
SEO Ranking
The SEO rank of a website never remains static. Once it starts responding slow, users lose their interests and so do search engines. The faster loading websites rank better on the search engine results page (SERP).
Google confirmed that site speed matters in SEO ranking in 2018. Three years later, Google engineer Philip Walton said in a Google AMA announced speed-related metrics that “while core vitals aren’t the end-all-be-all factor, Google takes them seriously”.
Shopify’s Help
If your online store is based on Shopify, you can take help from tools like Lighthouse and Shopify Theme Inspector to check Shopify store’s speed. Online store speed report of Shopify uses Lighthouse to measure store’s speed. Merchants can run their own Lighthouse report with the help of Google PageSpeed Insights. This will help them to check more details metrics for pages.
Shopify Theme Inspector, on the other hand, helps merchants to identify lines of codes that degrades speed of pages in online store. It is a profiling tool to display Liquid render performance using a flame graph.
