Optimizing your online store speed can improve the shopping experience for your customers, make your store more discoverable, and increase conversion. Several factors impact your online store speed, including the following:

• Apps

• Third-party libraries and services

• Analytic libraries

• Theme features

• The number and size of images and videos

When you see the results of your test keep in mind that there will always be a balancing act between making sure your site is fast and offering the features and content that make your products desirable to potential customers.

While speed scores are a helpful gauge, they aren’t everything. An ultra-fast store still needs to be a convincing store in order to convert. Speed tests are designed to test worst-case scenarios that may be far from your customers’ actual experiences.

Speed matters but it's best optimized as a final stage of a proven business. Focus on your products, content and marketing first and keep in mind that even wildly successful businesses have low speed scores:

1. Be ruthless about the apps you include

Apps are by far the biggest contributor to poor performance in an online store and are your best starting point for improving site speed. In one test, a developer found that adding just 6 apps to Shopify’s feature-light Debut theme brought it’s score down by 52 points. 

There will always be apps that are crucial to your particular business but for those other “maybe this will help” apps you’ll want to take a more comprehensive look at if the app could be helping your store enough to justify its effect on your site speed.

Apps are loaded in by a variety of methods and some are more efficient than others. For any apps you decide to keep, it’s worth checking with the app developers to ensure that their app and its assets are loaded in at the most efficient time.

Tips:

• Remove any unnecessary apps

• Ensure apps are installed efficiently with app developers

2. How important is your video or GIF content?

Video and GIF files are much larger than images and take longer to load. Videos can also share colorful details about your product that traditional photography can't match. If you sell a complicated or feature-rich product, it might make sense to keep videos on your product pages, even if they result in slightly slower load times. 

Tips:

• Is all your video content necessary?

• Use videos over GIFs when possible

• Avoid Vimeo for video content

3. Consider page length

Generally speaking, longer pages will take slightly longer to load in at first. When possible, we recommend keeping your content short and to the point. It’s better to do more with less, both from a speed perspective and, most importantly, for keeping your customers interested and engaged. As mobile continues to expand its dominance, statistics show mobile users read half as many pages and spend half as much time on site compared to desktop, making this a good opportunity to rethink your content strategy.

That said, it’s important to compare tapping vs scrolling for your given situation. Customers need more convincing to tap on a link and navigate to a new page than they do to scroll down a page they are already on. This means that a longer page, while slightly slower to load, could result in more engagement as the user would interact with more content in the long run.

Tips:

• Rethink your marketing points: could they be more succinct?

• If you have a large inventory, consider the number of products shown on collection pages

• Reduce the use of multi-slide slideshows

We’ve designed all our themes with a balance of quality and performance in mind and, while we do tend to believe in higher-quality fast experiences over more basic experiences but extremely fast experiences, we are constantly improving our performance techniques and will continue to release new versions with further speed improvements.

Ultimately, only you can decide what trade-offs between functionality and performance are the right decisions for your business.

Resources:

• How Apps Affect Load Speed

• Pingdom Testing Tool

• GTMetrix Testing Tool

• Google Pagespeed Insights Tool