How can I improve my online store's speed?

[PatPatW]

Hi there, my store speed is pretty slow, how can i increase my store speed?

[Rae]

Hi, @PatPatW! 

Rae from Shopify here. Thanks for reaching out about this! 

Have you had a chance to check out your online store speed report to determine the current speed of your site? If not, I really recommend doing this by following these steps. 

Once you've confirmed your current store speed, there are some factors you can control to help improve this. These factors include elements related to apps, the theme you're using, coding, images, and videos. To learn more about these factors, and what recommendations we have for improving them and increasing your store speed, please take a look over this help document. Additionally, if you've downloaded custom fonts to your site, these may also be increasing the loading time of your pages. You can learn more about this here. 

If you're interested in doing some extra investigating into your store's speed once you've reviewed the factors above, I suggest trying out some of these troubleshooting tools. 

It's also important to mention that there are some factors you can't control when it comes to store speed, such as your customer's device, network, and location, as well as Shopify's infrastructure. We've shared more details on these factors here. 

Please keep me posted on how your online store speed report currently looks, and how this report changes and improves once you make some edits to the factors you can control. Equally, if you'd like to share your URL with me here, I can take a look at your storefront to see how it loads on my end, and help determine where the loading issues may be coming from. 

I look forward to hearing back from you about this soon! 

[JohnCodes]

Hi @PatPatW 

I'd start by running your website URL through the Shopify Analyzer (a free analysis tool we built for the Shopify community). It'll give you some actionable insights into what can be done to improve your store's performance.

Some main things you'll want to look into are:

• Lazy loading. Lazy loading waits for images to come into a user's view before loading, instead of trying to load all images at once. We have an article you can check out that details more on how to implement this: How to Lazy Load Images on Shopify 
• Image optimization. See if you have any oversized images that could benefit from being resized or compressed.
• Minify Files. See if there are any files you can minify so that they execute faster when the page is loaded.
• Uninstall non-essential apps. Apps can have the largest impact on performance so it's best to keep your installed apps list pretty lean.
• Look for old app code. After an app is uninstalled, it's not uncommon for the code to remain in your theme. It's best to go through your main theme files and see if you can identify any old code that can be removed.

Those are some major optimizations you can start with. We have an in-depth optimization guide if you'd like to tackle this in-house: How to Optimize a Shopify Site: Complete Guide to Faster Load Speed.

If you'd like any help, please feel free to reach out to our team at speedboostr.com/contact. Best of luck!