Shopify Optimization and Marketing Strategy

A faster eCommerce site improves your SEO, conversion rate, engagement, traffic and sales. Nice! Here are some actionable tips you can do today to make your Shopify site faster.

1. Image Optimization

Images are usually the most significant factor in page load speed because they’re heavy. Here are some tips to optimize your images.

• Use an app like Crush Pics to automatically compress your images while keeping image quality.
• Make sure your theme is loading the correct size images. If you see a PageSpeed warning that you need to resize your images, this usually means your theme is loading larger than necessary images.
• Use correct image formats – Save photographic images as JPG and not PNG (we’ve seen a simple switch to JPG on a PNG photo save 80% file size). Usually PNG or SVG is best for graphics.

2. Lighten The Load

It looks nice to have a full page with a bunch of widgets, sliders, images, etc, but every loaded element contributes to page speed.

• Think about what you want to accomplish on each page and cut back the excess elements that don’t contribute to that goal.
• Load fewer elements in your carousels and collection pages. Try showing around 20 products on collection pages instead of 30 or 40+. Side bonus you get more page views.
• Use a static banner image instead of a slider with multiple images.

3. Do an App Analysis

We analyze the details of apps and the files they load in our Pro and Entrepreneur packages, but a quick hit you can do is take a look at each of your apps and decide if you really need it.

Example: If you have a Wishlist app, take a look at the analytics and see how many people use the wishlist and if they are converting into sales. If not, consider whether it’s important enough to keep.

Another angle to look at – If an app provides a function that could be hard coded into the theme, look into a custom solution.

Summary

Compress and optimize your images, keep your site lean, and limit your apps to the key performers.

If you’d rather have us handle this plus do a full optimization on your site, check out our Shopify performance optimization services here.

The key is keeping high resolution images like this ^^^ optimized.

The Speed Boostr service optimizes your website and makes it faster. Here are some tips to keep it that way.

1. Optimize your images

Product, Collection Featured, Blog Featured, and Asset Images: If you have an app like Crush Pics these images will always be compressed automatically.

Theme Options, Files Section: Images you upload into your theme options (Customize Theme) or Files (Settings > Files) will usually need to be manually compressed. (more…)

There are 2 ways to make your files smaller: minifying and compressing them.

Minifying scripts and stylesheets removes all the excess spacing and code comments in the actual files to max compact the code and file size.

Compressing files makes them lighter to transfer from your server.

What is compression?

Compression is a technique that allows the web server and browser to agree on a common compression format (gzip) and transfer much lighter files.

Google says gzip compression can reduce the size of the transferred response by up to 90%. Whoa!