How crucial is site speed for SEO and user experience?

Shopify Discussion
1

Hello!

I recently created a Shopify site https://fortysixten.net/

I saw my speed score started somewhat high and dropped down to a 24.

Could this be from photos and apps I’ve added to the site? How important is this to my site experience and SEO?

Any advice and feedback would be helpful!

Thank you

2

One big factor in the importance of site speed is that it strongly affects your SEO. Google has already told us that one of the ranking factors they use is page speed. And in 2017, they announced that page speed will receive even more consideration, including how fast your website loads on a mobile device.

1 Like
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Any tips on improving a slow site?

4

Hello Calebweidner,

Thanks for reaching out to the community!

From SEO’s standpoint, good page speed is significantly important for the website. Good page speed is liked by both search engine crawlers and users, as:

  • Crawlers can crawl and index every page of the website within a small duration of time, which also optimizes the indexing process and increases the website’s chances of ranking better on SERP.
  • It reduces the overall waiting time of the visitors; thus, enhancing user experience on the website and influencing them to make a purchase from the website.

So, here are some ways in which you can improve the website’s speed:

  1. Use Lightweight Shopify Theme: Lightweight Shopify theme will ensure that there is not much scripting on the website, which ensures the smooth functioning of the website. Additionally, avoid over-optimizing or customizing the theme, as it increases the volume of scripting and increases the loading time of the website.
  2. Compress Images: You can compress the images by using SEO tools or apps, like SEOKart, which reduces the file size of the images without hampering their visual quality. Thus, reducing the loading time of the website.
  3. Implement AMP: AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is the open-source HTML framework by Google, and its implementation allows Google to store the cached versions of the pages in the server, which reduces the loading time of the website on mobile devices.
  4. Remove Unused JavaScript and CSS: It is common to have unused and unnecessary JavaScript and CSS codes, which hampers the speed of the website. For instance, many times when you uninstall an app, it leaves some residues in the form of JavaScript codes. Removing such codes can help you optimize the website speed.
  5. Implement Lazy Loading: Lazy loading is a technique, which involves identifying some resources of the website and increasing their waiting time to load or programming them to load only when required. This technique can be implemented for images or advertisements on the website.
  6. Enable Browser Caching: This can enable the browsers to store the cached versions of the website/web pages in the server, which reduces the loading time of the website on that server.

Hope it helps!

Leesha

SEOKart