Can anyone please confirm how to speed my website up? I am ranking at 26/27 which advises this is slow for my store and theme?
Hi @HEALINGANDHER I can help you out:
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Run your site through the Shopify Analyzer to see if there are any issues in performance, common to Shopify stores. That will tell you if anything is wrong and how to fix them.
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Do some app optimization (delete old app code, conditionally load apps to only certain pages where they’re needed, etc). This guide will help you do that: [App Optimization Guide for Shopify.](http://App%20Optimization Guide for Shopify)
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If you’re talking about the score of the Shopify speed score, be aware that the tool you’re using pulls from Google PageSpeed Insights, which is a general performance analysis tool to give recommendations based on the code it crawls on your site. It’s not well suited for ecommerce sites that use apps to increase engagement / conversions, so the scores are typically low. We generally see scores in the range of 20 - 40 for active Shopify stores.
If you’re new to optimization and want to learn, this post will help: [Understanding Load Speed + Analysis Tools and Scoring on Shopify](http://Understanding%20Load Speed + Analysis Tools and Scoring on Shopify)
If you get stuck along the way or prefer to hire a profession, feel free to contact my team (we’ve optimized over 1500+ Shopify stores) at speedboostr.com/contact.
We also can do a free analysis for you if it helps.
Please see my results..
Hi @HEALINGANDHER ,
When it comes to site speed, please note that there are several factors impacting your online store speed, some of which you can control, others you cannot.
Factors you can’t control
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Your customer’s device, network, and location
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Shopify infrastructure
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Content delivery network (CDN)
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Local browser cache
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Server-side page cache
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The assets inside the content_for_header Liquid tag
Factors you can control
- Unnecessary Apps
When you add apps to change the functionality or appearance of your online store, they add code into the theme so they can run. Some code can be removed or reordered to improve your online store’s performance. If you’re not using an app, then you can remove it.
- Themes
Themes are made up of Liquid, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. When you edit or customize themes, file sizes can increase and affect your store speed.
- Complex or inefficient Liquid code
You can edit almost all of the Liquid that is used to render your store. There are efficient and inefficient ways of writing Liquid code. Doing complex operations repeatedly can increase your Liquid render time, which impacts your overall store speed.
- Images and videos
High-resolution images usually require large files and therefore slow down page loading times.
- Fonts
If you use a font that does not yet exist on your customer’s computer, then the font has to be downloaded before your text can be displayed.
I suggest you try AVADA SEO Suite which has great features that can help you with improving site speed such as Image Optimization, Speed Up, Lazy Loading, and Minification (removes unnecessary information from the source code**)**.
You can also refer to this Shopify post about Improving Speed.
I hope my answer can help you achieve your goals.
@HEALINGANDHER it looks like images are contributing significant unnecessary weight.
I’m seeing 7 warnings for lazy loading on that page. Lazy loading is a technique that loads images as the user scrolls, rather than all at once. You can use this guide to implement:
Also the oversized images warning shows you have large images like 1440x1440 loading on mobile screens (where a user may have a 400px screen size, lots of extra weight there).
I would start with those, then go into app optimization that I mentioned earlier. You can click through on any results in the Shopify Analyzer to see details / recommendations how to fix. Here’s a guide to lazy loading if you want to handle that in-house: https://speedboostr.com/shopify-lazy-loading.