To Improve Load Time Of Your Shopify Store, Examine The Apps In Your Store

In today’s digital world, Speed or load time is a major factor behind the success of any store.

The website speed makes the first impression about your business. It’s essential to understand that you won’t get a second chance when it comes to user experience.

Studies have shown the direct impact of load time on conversion. Some of the factors in speed optimization are images & videos, hosting, CMS, icons & content, scripts, apps, and clean code.

In this article, we will discuss some of the factors in brief.  

Image Optimization: One should always use web-optimized images and be careful about the size of their images as heavy images take more time to load. To make your store faster, use lazy load images.

Scripts: All the CDN and other scripts files should be loaded after the store loads. Use defer in your code to load scripts in the end.

Fonts Optimization: Use an internal library as Shopify has given a wide range of fonts in the library. It will load faster than any other custom font. 

Video optimization: Oversized videos that are hidden from view can interfere with loading other, more important parts of a page. If users have to wait for large videos to load, they might perceive your store to be slow.

Use youtube iframes or Vimeo for your videos rather than HTML tags.

Clean code: The way your code has been written can also be a factor that affects the speed of your store, your code should be short and unnecessary code shouldn't be there.

Optimized theme: 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. Use themes from the Shopify theme store or ThemeForest, which has already been optimized for speed.

Apps: The major factor in speed optimization on Shopify are apps. Apps affect the speed of our store in many ways.

If you are someone who usually installs and uninstalls apps on their theme, there is a chance of leftover code remaining in your theme from uninstalled apps still loading unnecessary resources.

Most of the applications on Shopify are created by a third party. These applications are loaded from external hosting.

All the scripts, styles and HTML will be loaded externally. It will also increase the no. of HTTP requests to load sources which will result in affecting the speed of your store.

The solution :                              

Use minimum apps as required. Uninstall apps that are no longer in use. After uninstalling an app make sure to remove the leftover code from your theme.

Try to solve the problems with theme liquid, CSS, and js code rather than installing an app, especially for small tasks.

Hope You found the above helpful.