According to Amazon, every 100 milliseconds of added load time can decrease sales by 1%. A 100 millisecond decrease can increase sales by 1%. A single blink of an eye can take 100 milliseconds. Meaning, if your website is too slow, you can actually lose money in the blink of an eye. Here are a few things any Shopify Merchant can do to speed up their load time.
Image Optimization
Images add to page load times. Compressing images will decrease the load times. There are apps that Shopify Merchants can install to compress images. The apps will compress every image in a few minutes.
Another option to optimize images is lazy loading. Lazy loading prevents images from loading immediately when a page loads. The images start loading when a visitor scrolls to the image. If a user never scrolls to the image, it never loads.
Image optimization is important because, after apps, images take the most time to load on a page. A Shopify Store can do both image compression and lazy loading.
Apps
Every app installed on a Shopify store adds to the store’s load time. Every store needs to install apps. But there is such a thing as too many apps. The best way to prevent apps from adding to your load time is to audit your apps. Once a month, go through the apps you’ve installed, and verify you use the app.
I have seen stores that install 2 different apps, and they have the same functionality. While auditing your apps, check the features to avoid this error.
Apps get updated regularly. If you do not update your apps, they might become incompatible with your theme. The incompatibility will lead to load time errors and a bad customer experience.
Theme
The Dawn theme is the key to optimizing a Shopify theme for site speed. The Dawn theme, created by Shopify, is the most basic theme.
The other option is a third-party theme. Third-party themes might contain unnecessary lines of code. The third party might have added lines of code related to data collection. These unnecessary lines of code may only slightly slow down your load time. But added with extra apps or unoptimized images, visitors might notice a slow website.
Using the Dawn theme avoids the issue of extra lines of code in your theme. Third-party themes might include theme features you do not want. Those hard-coded in features might get difficult to remove. It is better to start with a basic theme and add features by installing apps through the Shopify App Store. This method avoids having to make big changes to your underlying theme. Shopify Merchants will have more control over their theme and design too.
Conclusion
I don’t care how unique you think your product is. People can always find another place to buy an alternative. Don’t give them a reason to look somewhere else.
Originally published at https://convertifyapps.com
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