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Are you a Shopify store owner? In this video you will learn three things:
1) Why Shopify page speed matter?
2) Should you invest in Shopify speed optimization?
3) How to speed up a Shopify store?
📷 Camera Andrew Uses: tinyurl.com/57b46rd5
💡 Video Lighting Andrew Uses: tinyurl.com/y3zse8kh
🎙 Microphone Andrew Uses: tinyurl.com/fr5cvd32
Gear Andrew Uses: tinyurl.com/5hp2wv9f
We are ecomexperts.io. We’re a team of eCommerce experts that obsess over Shopify store speed and site performance. To that end, we’ve designed a powerful site speed analyzer from the ground up, specifically for Shopify. And have helped hundreds of store owners increase their store’s performance
But is site speed really that important? A second or two can’t really make a big difference, right? Wrong. By optimizing your Shopify store, you’re directly improving your:
SEO rankings
Conversion rate
Pageviews & user engagement
Return on ad spend
I don’t know a single store owner that would say “no” to any of that. But if you still need some convincing, the numbers don’t lie:
Walmart saw a 2% conversion increase for every 1 second improvement in page load time.
COOK found that a mere 0.85 second decrease in page load time led to a massive 7% improvement in conversions.
This isn’t something new, either. It’s just that most store owners don’t know about it. Way back in 2010, Google announced they would take into account site speed within their pagerank algorithm - confirming how critical it is for SEO.
It’s just common sense when you think about it. Everyone has clicked on an intriguing ad while they’re procrastinating, but then the link loads just slowly enough for you to remember that you really should be working - not shopping for that cool-looking dinosaur pillow. You close the window. The money the site owner spent on the ad? Wasted.
If you’re in ecommerce, speed matters. And it matters a great deal. It can be a hard concept to accept at first, especially since it seems like such a highly technical and confusing topic. But it’s really not so bad once you break it down, which is why we’re here.T
That brings us to our next point. Should every single Shopify owner stop what they’re doing and invest in site performance. The answer is no.
While site speed is crucial, improving performance can be costly. It’s also something you need to maintain over time. As a business owner, it’s your duty to find the lowest hanging fruit with the best ROI as you put money back into your business.
Focusing on site performance probably isn’t the best idea if your monthly revenue is less than $7,000. After working with hundreds of stores of the years, this is the threshold we’ve seen where investing in proper site speed optimization makes sense and provides a slam-dunk 2-to-1 ROI. For store owners with a monthly revenue lower than $7k, it’s usually wiser to focus your resources on improving your product or your marketing efforts. There are of course exceptions to this, however, we have found this to be the best indicator for ROI.
Back to site speed. So what is considered to be “average” site performance? The industry benchmarks are:
Maximum 5 second load time
Average of 2.9 MB page size
Average of 119 requests per page
If those three things sound like gibberish to you then don’t worry, we’ll get to that later.
No matter how you proceed with improving your site speed, there’s a few common pitfalls you should be aware of, as well as a few easy tricks that will help you avoid outrageously long load times:
What gets measured - gets managed! Stay on top of your store’s performance and test your store on a monthly basis using free tools like www.testmystorespeed.com.
Be careful with apps, even the free ones. Most apps insert code in your store theme when you install them. The bad news? This code doesn’t get removed when you delete the app. It just stays there, slowing your site down.
Check your images. Make sure every single one is the correct size. Don’t let them be automatically re-sized by the code. Make sure they’re in JPEG format, too.
Design for performance. - Is that image carousel on your homepage really necessary? Have you checked with heatmaps to see how many people actually view the second, let alone the third image?. Keep it simple and keep mobile performance in mind. Your ad dollars will thank you.
So by now you should know:
Why speed is important.
Whether or not you should invest in professional help.
What you can do to make sure your Shopify store performance doesn’t spin out of control.
In our next video, I’ll teach you how to read every element of a speed report, what page requests really mean, and how to make sense of it all. By the end of this series, you’ll be a true performance pro.