How can I improve my page speed with the Dawn theme?

[artifulboutique]

I am trying really hard to fix all of my issues. I just don’t know how to do it the right way. Last time, I broke down pretty bad my code. I had to redownload the theme…

To help me, I tried Avada app but my score didn’t improved at all. Is there someone here who can help me?

www.artifulboutique.com

[Savior]

@artifulboutique

Hello hope your are well

If you don’t have knowledge of coding please try to hire a developer as they can help you with your issue.

If helpful please like and accept as solution. Hire me or for any queries DM or mail at shopify.dev.34@gmail.com

[wesky]

This is one of the most popular issues that I faced in the last year then I realized that the theme I was using was the issue to slow the speed of thepage you can click here to learn about it.

[ThomasBorowski]

Dawn is very fast out of the box. The biggest contributors to the low page speed score seem to be Buddha Megamenu and Weglot, they both account for around 10 seconds of JS execution time.

[OliviaMichaelCo]

I am having the same issue as you. My Dawn theme is running really slow and suddenly dropped from a score of around 52 to 32 overnight despite me not changing anything at all.

Some things I did to speed mine up:

1. I removed every block from the theme that I had ‘hidden for later’ in the editor as this was just not necessary.
2. I removed all apps that I had tested but decided I didn’t want to use. I only have apps I’m using installed.
3. I reduced all my product images to a maximum of 1024 x 1024 and then put them back through tinyPNG which reduced them more. Before they were 3000 x 3000 before going through tiny PNG.
4. I changed every other image on the site to optimise them for the space they were in. For example, headers were set to a maximum of 1600 x 420 (I think) and then put through tinyPNG again. This is both on the checkout and main page.
5. I stopped adding images using the ‘free images’ option to add images to the site as these were often very large in size. I downloaded them, resized them and you guessed it, put them back through tinyPNG before uploading them.
6. I deleted all unused images and files from my store that I wasn’t using.

I still have a long way to go with page optimisation and there are more things I want to do to improve the mobile experience, but just doing the above changed my score from this…

To this…

The last things I need to try and work out are:

• Reduce unused JavaScript - I don’t know how I can do this when it relates to social widgets and Shopify code that quite frankly I’m too scared to touch.
• Eliminate render-blocking resources - Again, as above, no idea how to do this, but more research will be done over the next few days.

Best of luck to you.

[ThomasBorowski]

Improving that score isn’t a goal in and of itself. The overall goal should be to optimize the store for the visitor/customer, not to improve some arbitrary score. A faster-loading page is of course better than a slow one, but not if that increase in speed comes at the expense of usability, overall appeal and ultimately conversions. And a better score doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily get more visitors or that those visitors will spend more.

Here’s a good article to put the speed score into perspective: https://presidiocreative.com/blogs/news/the-shopify-speed-score-what-it-actually-means

Optimizing images (i. e. compressing them) before uploading them is definitely a good idea as the compression algorithm Shopify uses when resizing uploaded images on the server isn’t all that great. But resizing images before uploading isn’t always necessary as most current themes (including Dawn) are designed to load images only at a maximum size that’s required for the given context. So resizing an image from 3000 x 3000 to 1500 x 1500 before uploading won’t reduce the overall page size if the theme is already loading the image in question at 400 x 400 for the given device/viewport size.