How can I optimize my Shopify theme to increase my website: https://smartcalc.online/ page load speed?
Hi @Andrew_Downey ,
Thank you for reaching out to the Community! I’m happy to provide some assistance with improving your site speed, to ensure this gets resolved.
To ensure your shop’s theme is optimized, you can review the following site speed improvements:
- Too many apps trying to load at one time: The more apps that are running at once, the longer the loading times will be. Determine if you really need all those apps and If you’re not using them at all, then you should remove them. I know you mentioned you’ve recently added some new features, are these with the help of apps?
- Theme customizations: When you edit or customize themes, file sizes can increase and affect your store speed. If you have a heavily customized theme, this may be something to take into consideration.
- Image sizes: As @cristian_dev has mentioned, you can try optimizing the images currently in your shop. The larger the image size and the more videos and slideshows you display, the longer it will take to load. We also have a great blog article with 10 Must Know Image Optimization Tips.
- The end-user/customer browser, device, and internet connection: This is something you won’t have control over of course, but it is good to keep in mind.
Additionally, I recommend checking out our Improving Your Online Speed Score document as it touches on a few more tips and suggestions. If you are using a Free Shopify Theme, we may be able to investigate further to provide basic performance improvements. You can learn more about the support available, in our Support For Themes document.
You may also consider hiring a Shopify Expert. They are trusted third-party agencies and freelancers that work to help improve your business! To learn more, you can check out our Expert Marketplace.
Please let me know if there’s anything else I can assist with.
Hello Andrew_Downey,
Thanks for reaching out!
You have an interesting website and with some effort, you can achieve what you want. So, here are some suggestions you can consider to optimize the page speed of your website.
1. Avoid Over-Customizing the Theme: It is important to customize the Shopify themes to enhance the website’s SEO. It is important for the website to ensure that the theme has proper heading tags, optimized URLs, meta tags, optimized images, etc., or the website may lose its ranking on the search engine results page (SERP). However, over-customizing the Shopify theme can increase the file size and increase the number of elements on the website, which can impact the loading speed of the website.
2. Compress the File Size of the Images: Large-sized images load slowly, which increases the overall speed of the website. Thus, having too many large images can hamper your website’s speed. So, here you can use SEO tools, like SEOKart, to compress the file size of the image and change its format without hampering its visual quality to reduce its loading time.
3. Implement Lazy Loading for Advertisement: Lazy loading is the technique that reduces the loading speed of some meta tags on the website to help other important content on the website load quickly. Implementing this technique for advertisements can help the website to make the important content of the website available for web users.
4. Remove Unused Javascript: Heavy scripting is another reason for the slow loading speed of the website. Well, all you have to do is remove unnecessary and unused JavaScript from your website, which will significantly facilitate improving the page speed of the website.
5. Implement AMP: AMP or accelerated mobile pages is an open-source HTML framework, whose implementation allow Google to save the cached versions of these pages in the server and reduce the loading time of the pages on mobile device.
Hope the answer helped!
Leesha