Hello Merchants,
Greetings for the day. We hope you are doing well.
As Shopify merchants, you might have encountered this one issue when your product images take too long to load when customers access your store. Unfortunately, this increases the bounce rate, and customers unwillingly leave your store without purchasing.
Now before we take you to the solution and how to cope with this situation, let’s first examine why this happens in the first place.
One of the main reasons why product images on your Shopify store may take too long to load is their large file size. Large image files can slow down the loading time of your website, particularly for customers with slower internet speeds or devices with limited processing power.
Another reason why product images may take too long to load is the format in which they are saved. GIFs, for instance, tend to be larger than static images, which can significantly increase the loading time of your website.
To address these issues, you can take several steps to optimize your product images.
One effective strategy is replacing GIFs with static images. Static images tend to be smaller and load faster, resulting in a smoother user experience for your customers.
What is a static image?
The term static images might be confusing to some merchants. Static images are images without animation or interactive elements; hence, they get easily downloaded, such as photographs or illustrations. These images are used everywhere in print and digital media to convey information.
How to create static images?
Some examples of static images are pictures, posters, and advertisement banners. You can create static images with the help of various tools such as image editing software like Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, or Canva.
But how does replacing GIFs with static images help decrease your Shopify store’s loading time?
Static images typically have smaller file sizes than GIFs and hence load faster. GIFs are often larger because they contain multiple frames of animation. A webpage containing several GIFs will make more server requests than a page with only static images. Each request adds to the page load time.
Therefore, static images load much faster and provide the desired information to buyers within less time, leading to a much lesser bounce rate and sometimes conversions. Also, while ranking web pages on SERP, the search engines consider page load times, and pages that load quickly are more likely to rank higher in search results.
Reducing file size to gain better load time for images.
Another strategy is to reduce the file size of your images without compromising their quality. This can be achieved through image compression.
Compressing images reduces file sizes, which means it will take less time to load. Compressed images can significantly improve your website’s load times, especially for visitors on slower internet connections or mobile devices.
Compressing images can ensure a positive user experience and keep visitors engaged with your content. You can also crop your images to eliminate unnecessary background or space.
How to compress images without comprising the quality of the image?
There are several tools available for compressing images. Here are some effectively impressive free options that you can use:
- TinyPNG is a popular tool that uses intelligent compression techniques to reduce the file size of PNG and JPEG images. You can use this to compress 500 images per month.
- Compressor.io is another rising online tool that can compress JPEG, PNG, GIF, and SVG images. It offers lossless and lossy compression options and can reduce your image file sizes by up to 90% without affecting the quality.
- Kraken.io is the latest among image compression tools offering free and paid plans for compressing JPEG, PNG, and GIF images. With its free plan, you can compress up to 100MB of images monthly.
Hope you found this answer helpful. We are sure these measures will help you fix your slow-loading pages for customers on slower data speed and mobile devices.
In case you cannot fix this issue by yourself, we advise you to connect with any Shopify expert or developer to get this done. Please do not hesitate to ask for any help.
All the best,
CedCommerce