5 Ways to Increase Shopify page speed in 2023

5 actionable steps you can take today to increase site speed for your Shopify store

For e-commerce businesses, time is literally money.

Just a few seconds can be the difference between a site visitor making a purchase or abandoning your site. And those few seconds are all based on how long your Shopify store takes to load. If your store's time to interaction (TTI, the time between a shopper clicking on a link and your Shopify page fully loading) is longer than three seconds, 53 percent of your potential customers will abandon your website and seek out your competition. And competition is pretty fast: In a recent study by Pingdom, 78% of the highest-ranking e-commerce sites had a load time shorter than three secondsand the three top performers all loaded in under one second.

That sub-second TTI is the goal for your store. In a digital landscape where every second counts and shopper patient is steadily dropping, the benchmark time for retail websites is really closer to two seconds.

Impact of a Slow Site

This small difference in time can have a major impacts a delay of one second on your Shopify store could mean:

An 11 percent drop in page views
A seven percent loss in conversions
A 16 percent loss in potential customer base

As just one example, for Amazon, a slowdown of a single second could cost up to $1.6 billion in sales annually. In addition, Google has already announced that site speed is becoming a more prominent ranking factor in its search algorithm, meaning less opportunity for potential customers to see your site.

The potential negative effects make your Shopify store's load time a factor you can't ignore. Whether your Shopify store is achieving the two-second benchmark or takes much longer to display, giving it a speed boost begins with understanding your site's current performance.

Analyzing Your Shopify Store

Having a baseline of your e-commerce site's current stats will give you a better idea of where you stand and what you need to do to shorten that page load speed. There are many tools that can help you analyze your store's current performance, including several free options. Your choice of page speed tool is not as important as using its analysis to improve your Shopify store though. Some popular performance-measuring tools are:

Boosting Your Site's Speed

Armed with an overview of your store's performance, you can then begin to drill down to specific factors affecting your store's load speed. The following are a few of the usual suspects when it comes to slowing down websites, as well as the changes you can make to build your Shopify stores for speed.

Bloated Image Files

Images make up to 60 percent of an average page's total size and are undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of your store. While high-quality images certainly have a role in selling your products, they can also be one of the most significant contributors to a long page loading time, increasing your site's TTI exponentially. Understanding key aspects of your images can help you streamline them for a faster-moving site.

Image format: JPG is generally the standard for high-quality product images keeping processing to a minimum will keep your image quality high while the file size low. PNGs should only be used when image transparency is essential and GIFs should be restricted to small animations with limited colors.
Image size: Oversized images take longer to load. Ideally, you can quickly reduce your page load speed by using the exact dimensions you need for your images, instead of having the website shrink much larger images that come with much larger files.

Non-Mobile Friendly Website Features

Mobile browsing is more popular than ever, and part of your Shopify store's speed rating should take its mobile page speed into consideration. With 37% of shoppers starting on mobile, it's something you can't afford to ignore. While mobile shoppers have slightly different expectations for page speed, additional factors contribute to load time on mobile devices. The analysis tools listed above can help identify where your Shopify store can be more mobile-friendly.

Oversized CSS

The tech powering your store can also impact your store's page load speed. Enriched user experiences offered by advanced CSS and JavaScript elements also result in a serious slowdown of Shopify stores, which is far from optimal. Minification, which removes all unnecessary characters from your source code, makes your CSS more compact without removing any functionality.

Two tools that can help you shrink your CSS and other coded elements are:

Optimize use of Shopify apps

This is a sneaky one that creeps up over time. In 2023, we're quick to install the latest Shopify app released to the app store, sometimes just to take one for a spin to check it out. Every quarter, you should audit your app list and uninstall apps that don't move the needle. Apps are on of the biggest sources of bloat for your store, really think about if the app is worth the additional bagagge to your page speed.

Excessive HTTP Requests and Redirects

Downloading the different parts of your web page scripts, images, stylesheets, flash components, and ads compose up to 80 percent of that page's load time. Each element results in an HTTP request, so the more elements you have on each Shopify store page, the longer that page will take to fully render.

Ways to reduce HTTP requests on your Shopify store:

Streamline the number of elements on your page
Combine multiple stylesheets into one
Use CSS instead of images
Reduce scripts and put them to the bottom of the page
Minimize redirects on your store

Try out our Page Speed Optimizer app

Your Shopify store's speed plays a critical role in the success of your e-commerce business. If you'd like a one click solution that can help - try our Page Speed Optimizer app.

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