Site speed - hosting providers for Shopify stores

[MichelleUK]

I run a Shopify store based in the UK and use LCN for hosting which points back to our shopify store address.

Trying to improve our site speed ahead of Google May 2021 update where speed becomes more important and was wondering if there is any benefit switching hosting providers from LCN to A2 or Namecheap who appear to be faster or will it make no difference because it's a Shopify store?

Ironically we already use a theme called turbo but from my experience, all shopify stores seem to run slow, even the biggest brands and stores like GymShark and ColourPop

[yalass]

Hello! You're talking about your DNS - how your domain name is found - which could have an impact on your site speed, but very rarely in 2020. I use premium DNS on my mission critical sites - my favorite is dnsmadeeasy. $30/year for 10 domains I think. However, performance is similar to clients on GoDaddy honestly. I do it just for the extra controls and risk reduction. With premium DNS you can keep your LCN registration, it just puts a different DNS server in front. If you'd like to do this, ask and I'm happy to provide instructions.

To really see a big impact, you'll need to optimize your Shopify theme/store itself. There's two basic parts to this: what happens on the backend (theme Liquid and app code) and how it loads on the frontend.

The frontend is the easiest to check yourself. Run it through a free GTMetrix report. At the bottom of the page on the left is this report is the page size (screenshot included), if the total page size is over 3MB no hosting or hack in the world will help. Your website is literally being thrown down the wire as fast as possible by Shopify, and think of throwing something a long distance in real life: heavier objects go less distance slower, and lighter objects travel further faster with only the original force. It's literally the same with websites. So if your website is heavy...it will go slow, and it will arrive with an unceremonious thud. The report will also tell you other interesting things. To start fixing this, optimize images aggressively - there should be many tutorials on doing this.

In terms of the backend, Shopify itself is fast, the apps are a different story. Make sure images are resized and compressed, delete as many apps as possible. If the pages are under 3MB and it's still slow, get your theme and app structure looked at by a pro. You can sorta guess how much is caused by the apps vs the theme in the GTMetrix report: if you get an error for caching on static assets, those are generated by a app. Shopify caches their CDN files aggressively and will not show up in that report usually.

As another comment said, I would need to see the store to analyze it. Great work getting started on this early, site speed is a super important thing! It's also something that takes time to fix properly, don't buy speed plugins and try hacks, they'll waste more of your time then they'll save in loadtimes.

[Calvin897]

Site speed - hosting providers for Shopify stores - Shopify community.shopify.com › Online-Store-Speed › td-p Kindly share your website URL so I can let you know about your shop speed and how it will be increased. Thanks

Best Regards.

[Jessy-clothes]

The main speed issue come from your theme which is not fast.

Try considering a switch to faster themes like : Vodoma, Shella or Plak... those are the top recommended shopify themes for the highest speed performance.

 

[NY_Fulcrum · Accepted solution]

Hi @MichelleUK , there's a lot that goes into picking a hosting provider and I'm wondering where you got the "who appear to be faster " information from?  While a good (fast) host is beneficial, a good host will not help (that much) if your shop/site pages are slow.  More importantly, Shopify is a hosted platform (Shopify itself manages the details of maintaining your site and its complexities -- CDNs, DNS, etc) so you don't need to particularly worry about that.  If you're worried about DNS redirect, I would suggest working with geographically diverse (and configurable) DNS such as that of AWS Route 53.

I hope that helps!  Good luck!

[MichelleUK]

Thanks for all your advice guys. Spent a few days resizing images and banners on and the home and actually managed to double the speed from what it was, amazing that small changes can make such a big difference. I also had way too many featured collections so it was having to look up all those images too but much better now 🙂