How to View Your 'Online Store Speed' Report, and How to Improve it!

Imogen
Shopify Staff

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Your online store speed can enhance your store’s discoverability, boost conversion rates and increase customers' loyalty. Ensuring that your store is fully optimized for speed and accessibility can have a huge impact on your customers' experience in a positive way. 

 

Impacts of your online store speed

 

When a customer loads your online store, you want all of the content on the homepage to be loaded within 2-4 seconds. This is the ideal time frame to keep your customers' attention and focus. 

 

No matter how aesthetically appealing the online store may be; if a visitor finds the store to be sluggish they may find a better alternative which can lead to a higher bounce rate and loss of conversion. 

 

Time is money and speed is a competitive advantage. A fast website navigates immediately, loads quickly and serves the customer to become available for the next one. 

 

Online store speed report


You can view your online store speed report by navigating to Analytics > Reports and finding the 'Online Store Speed' report. To view the report, click on the 'Online Store Speed' report title.

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A score is provided to your online store once the password page is removed. The score is re-calculated and updated daily, even if you did not make any changes. Your ranking is compared to other stores on the Shopify platform. 

 

A higher score is faster than similar stores, allowing more customers to have a positive buying experience. If your store speed is lower than similar stores then your store may not be accessible or user-friendly to all potential visitors.

 

How you can improve your online store speed

 

For every application you add to your online store, the application’s coding is added to your online store’s theme so they can run effectively. Some coding can be removed or reworked to allow your online store to run more efficiently. Keep track of the applications that are added to the online store as too many applications can slow down the website’s speed. Ask yourself, are the applications providing a solution and contributing to the customer experience? 

 

Identify which applications you want to continue using and which ones can be replaced or removed. When removing an application, take into account the coding for the application that was added as part of the app install process. 

 

Some applications may help you with this process by wrapping their code starting with {% comment %} and ending it with {% endcomment %} tags that mention the applications name. We’d recommend reaching out to the application developers who can assist you with the process.

 

Example: 

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 To view your theme's code, or edit your theme's code, you will want to access it. You can do so by using the following steps: Online store > Themes > Edit > Edit coding.

 

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In addition to apps, you will want to be mindful of the images on the online store. The recommended image format size is 4472 x 4472 px or 20 megapixels. Using large image files will cause the store to load slowly, especially if visitors are accessing your website from their smartphone or mobile device.

 

Depending on the theme you are using, specific theme features when enabled can also affect the speed of the online store. For example, if you are using a theme feature that uses a pop-up or pre-loads product information, this can affect your customers load time. You have the option to disable theme features and consider the balance between the online store features and speed. 

 

These are some of the most common issues merchants have when it comes to a low score; however, with a few tweaks, you can easily improve and empower your customer’s experience.

 

Each case is unique, so if you’re not comfortable making changes to the coding of your theme, or if you’d like a more personalized report on how to improve then we’d recommend reaching out to a Shopify ExpertThey can help you find inefficient and useless code as Experts have the knowledge and know-how to further improve your online store speed.

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