Why has my store speed score dropped from 57 to 27?

[Garias]

My site has gone from 57 speed score to 27 - I can t understand why ? Can anyone help ?

[Blair]

Hi @Garias,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community! I'm happy to provide some assistance with improving the shops speed score, to ensure this gets resolved. 

To gather a bit more information, are you able to share what theme you're currently using? Typically, there are 4 main reasons customers will experience slow loading times including: 

• 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: 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. 

[Garias]

Hi Blaire, Thanks for responding so quickly. We are using the empire theme.

The ony thing that I added most recently is a customer special suggetion box.

About a month ago I added a shoppable image on the front page.

We also have an app that is running that changes the prices per country. (but this has been running for months).. Thanks for your time

[Blair]

Hi @Garias,

No problem at all! Thank you for sharing that additional information. 

To confirm, when did you begin to notice the site speed decreasing? Was this after the most recent app was added for example? 

Alternatively, image sizes can impact the speed of your shop but if optimized, shouldn't overly impact the loading time. Due to this, I would recommend checking both the Image Optimization and recently added apps are not having any impact. If after completing this, the site remains slow you can hire one of our Experts for additional investigation. 

Please let me know if you have any other concerns. 

[flareAI]

Hello @Garias,

Gina here from flareAI.

Below are tips that can significantly speed up your Shopify store:

1. Removing unused app code is a best practice that avoids running code for unused features and makes your theme code easier to read.
2. Use a theme that is optimized for performance
3. Themes contain CSS, JS, HTML which can increase and affect your store speed. So disable theme features you don't use.
4. Loading extra data your customers aren't using can impact your store speed without adding value.
5. If you are using slideshows, keep slideshows of featured images to 2-3 slides or use one featured image.
6. Use a System font which is a font that is already installed on most computers. For example Segoe UI, Times New Roman. 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. This impacts the time that your store takes to load.
7. Reduce the use of large-sized images and also compress images without losing the quality
8. Use minified CSS and JS files
9. Replace GIFs with static images
10. To reduce the initial load time, you can use Lazyload technique
11. Remove third-party JS scripts and Shopify App which you are no longer using
12. Minimize HTTP requests
13. Avoid unnecessary redirects and fix broken links
14. You can run the Shopify Theme Inspector for Chrome to identify the lines of code that are slowing down pages in your online store.

If your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, 40% of your traffic will be lost. Apart from speeding up your store, for getting better conversions, make sure your store products are Found on Google. When your customers search on Google, your product can be found only if your page is indexed. Note that once a URL gets indexed, customers will start finding your store through organic searches, you will start getting order conversions for virtually zero cost. Making it sustainable business growth. flareAI helps to get your new products found on Google. flareAI works every day for you. Get sales from Google and 20+ world's largest free sales channels, Single click start!

I hope that the above list’s tips will help you decrease the load on your web pages and increase the Shopify website speed.

Hope this was helpful.

Gina
Add flareAI Shopify App today!

[Garias]

Thanks, I have uplaoded the stats generated by lighthouse - do you have any advice of what I cn do in response to these figures?