Children are impressionable, and their minds are easily formed, and this is why it is necessary that they get access to excellent learning facilities. BrightMinds remains a great source of excellent learning materials for children.
Founded by science teacher Alison Quill, she created BrightMinds with the goal to "set off that spark in children's minds." Putting her years of successful teaching experience into good use, Alison began finding the best educational toys on the market for all ages putting them for sale on her Shopify store.
Over time, she has added wooden toys, sustainable toys & a huge range of children's books to her store to help make sure your child gets that extra bit of help they deserve in both homework and learning fun.
The Challenge
As a one-stop center for educational toys, BrightMinds soon began to witness a large inflow of customers. It didn't take time for them to identify possible problems affecting customer experience, from loading the store to checking out.
To fix these problems, they soon began to include more functionalities and apps in their store to make sure that customers could easily use the store on any device.
However, it didn't take long for the store to begin to slow down. The poor UX design of the store caused customers to begin to seek help as they tried to navigate the store. Hence, many customers began to find it increasingly difficult to complete their purchases which meant that bounce rates increased significantly.
Another major problem was that the store's speed score reduced greatly. They found this out by running a speed test on their store using the TestMyStoreSpeed app. The speed test revealed their Shopify speed score to be under 50. They also noticed quite a number of duplicate apps, which also affected the store's speed greatly.
The impact of their slow loading time could be felt as the site began to drop in Google rankings. Compared to other learning sites, BrightMinds began to rank lower, which meant a drastic reduction in its organic search traffic.
How BrightMinds Found EcomExperts
Once they identified the cause of their store's low sales and conversions to be their slow site speed, the BrightMinds team immediately became on the lookout for an excellent Shopify speed optimization agency.
It didn't take long for the team to find EcomExperta through one of our speed videos. After determining EcomExperts to be the right agency for them by reading our case studies, the team immediately got in contact with us.
BrightMinds demands were simple; improve their Shopify site speed, page loading time, and Google rankings.
Once all of this was clarified in their consultation with Angie, their account manager, the team could start optimizing the BrightMinds site.
Optimizing BrightMinds Shopify Store
EcomExperts Senior Dev was assigned the job of optimizing the BrightMinds Shopify store. Before making any attempts to begin speed optimization, Farukh first identified the problems with the store's speed.
No hesitation in recommending the speed and site optimization that ecomexperts have done. Timely with professional communication. 
To do this, he ran speed tests on the store using TestMyStoreSpeed and Google Lighthouse. Using details from the results' waterfall, he could now begin optimizing the store's speed.
After reviewing the waterfall data, the team discovered that the store's loading scripts were to blame for a large portion of the store's speed performance issues. They began by introducing lazy-loading scripts for applications, content for headers, and other non-critical scripts to improve the store's speed score.
On the Shopify store, team noticed duplicate applications and programs that were no longer in use. Over 15 of the marketplace's 30 apps were not in use, while another 5 were duplicates. These apps have clogged up the store's performance, causing it to slow down significantly. EcomExperts team started by identifying the unnecessary and duplicate software; after he had a list, he uninstalled them one by one, making sure to remove any leftover codes.
The following are some of the speed optimization approaches utilized in cleaning the BrightMinds store:
inlining critical CSS,
- preloading CSS
- deferring off-screen images
-managing APPS priority and applying lazy loading on other apps.
Farukh optimized both critical and non-critical scripts on the store as a whole, guaranteeing that critical material loads first, regardless of how good or bad the internet is.
It's also worth mentioning that the team included an intentional delay on non-critical scripts, photos, and videos. This was done to ensure that the store's most important assets loaded rapidly, enhancing the user experience.
Once all of this was completed, he then passed the now optimized store along to QI.
Results
Speeding up the BrightMinds store was another successful task by the EcomExperts team. We managed to get the speed score over 90 in less than a week.
If your site has the same problems as the BrightMinds store, then it means it's time to optimize your Shopify store speed. Send a message to EcomExperts today for a free consultation and quote on how we can make your store faster.