Page performance (how quickly it loads in your visitor's web browser) is important to your Shopify store for a number of reasons including:
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Slow stores lose money. According to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again.
- Google's algorithms, which give you that free SEO traffic, will seriously ding poor performing sites and move them down the search engine results page.
These are the 4 things that affect performance that we can control in a Shopify store:
- How much content is put onto pages.
- Graphics. The size, compression, and format of graphics, which includes photos, icons, and videos.
- What theme is used. Some themes perform better than others.
- Apps. Apps can significantly add to page load times. And here's the thing, when you uninstall an app from your store, the app doesn't have permissions to remove its code from your theme. So your theme is bogged down by every app that you've tried out and removed.
We've developed a Performance Optimization Program for Shopify Stores. Here are the steps we take with your store to boost performance.
- We go through the site graphics and ensure they are optimized.
- We work with you to evaluate each of the main templates to see how much content is being added to pages. We'll trim the content as needed. This decluttering typically also improves the store's conversion rate.
- We work with you to evaluate all of the current apps and decide if they are actually worth it. Extraneous apps are removed.
- We go through the theme code with fine-toothed comb and identify what code is left over from removed apps and remove that extraneous code from the theme. This can take some time and most apps don't document the changes they make to themes.
- We then analyze each of the major page types (product, collection, page, homepage, blog, etc) with detailed diagnostic tools to determine what else is affecting performance and fix the ones that Shopify allows us to (some things we can't change).
