Top Tips for Optimizing Shopify eCommerce Website Speed

Speed is a critical factor for the growth of an online business. Whether it is about the fast loading of a web page or a closed check-out system, a visitor wants everything to be quick. The faster the page load, the better your online store’s ranking on Google search engine page results. Lower the page load speed, faster the bounce rate of your visitors. Hence to upscale your online business performance, you need to speed up your Shopify store for both page load and site load. 

Here are some of the top tips by an experienced Shopify eCommerce agency to optimize Shopify website speed:

1. Set up Google Tag Manager

Installing Google Tag Manager on your Shopify eCommerce site improves the overall site speed. It is the widely used tag management solution that stores marketing tags and can call all the tags at once without waiting for other tags to fire. Large files of customer data affect the overall speed of the Shopify site and its performance. Google Tag Manager combines all the Javascript (for general analytics, conversions, goal, etc.) tags into one JavaScript request and removes the corrupted tag quickly to slow down the speed.

2. Do Performance Analysis

Google allows us to perform analytics to check your eCommerce website’s page load speed for both desktop and mobile versions. Analyzing the page speed of a site helps you find the factors that cause delayed page load and provide you the page speed score. If the score is crossing the limit, you can ask your development team to take action on it and improve the site’s performance accordingly.

Here are the crucial elements that the Google Page Speed insight shows you on analyzing the website:

• Optimize images
• Minify CSS
• Minify JavaScript
• Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
• Leverage browser caching and Reduce server response time
• Avoid landing page redirects
• Gzip compression

Similar elements are suggested for mobile versions as well. Optimizing these elements improves the site speed, speeding up the performance.

3. Compress Large Images

Optimizing HTML and CSS files to improve the site’s performance is the one way you can speed up things. The next thing you can do is compress the images that are used on the website. Shopify allows various image formats to add to the site. Compressing the images to a level where they do not lose their quality can help overcome the page load time. 

Websites like tinypng.com or tinyjpg.com enable you to reduce the size of the image without affecting the quality. Similarly, there are tools like Crush.pics or Image Optimizer to compress image files without any quality loss for existing Shopify store images.

4. Reduce the Number of Apps Installed

There should be no more than 10 Apps on your Shopify store to maintain the page load speed and site’s performance. Having unnecessary and keeping unused apps on the website, affects the rate of your Shopify store. The JavaScript and CSS files of these apps keep running in the background, whether you are using those apps or not. Check and remove all the apps that you do not require.

5. Minimize Redirects and Broken Links

Redirects are instructions that direct the visitors of one file to another location. There are legitimate reasons to have redirects but keep in mind that they create page load issues and their performance. Remove unnecessary redirects to improve the overall load time of the website. In Shopify, 301 can be applied provided by the built-in redirects function called “URL redirect.”

Broken links are those URL which does not redirect to any page and gives you a 404 error. It affects the efforts done for SEO optimization and hence affects the Google rankings. Broken links also increase the unnecessary HTTP requests and harm the user experience. Install tools to find the broken links on your website. Google Analytics helps you identify the broken links when you log in to your Once you remember them, contact your development team from Shopify eCommerce agency to fix them.

Conclusion

These small tips to optimize your Shopify eCommerce can improve website speed. You can start optimizing images, HTML, and CSS and move forward with the harder ones one at a time. One smaller tip to improve the page speed is to upgrade the Shopify hosting plan. These are tried and tested website speed optimization practices, which improves the page speed dramatically.