Protective goggles offer eye protection from the damaging effects of UV rays or too much screen time.
SafetyBlue, a protective eyewear brand, is a family-owned company established based on personal experience. Founded by a husband and wife who had started as graphic students spending hours in front of computer screens, they soon realized that this practice was largely responsible for their headaches, eye pain, and blurred vision.
After taking a health certification course, they soon became aware of the negative effects of blue and green lights on the eyes and sleep. Soon after, they began developing blue-green blockers to put eye fatigue “to rest” once and for all, birthing the first pair of SafetyBlue Glasses.
With a mission to reduce the harmful impact of green and blue lights, SafetyBlue has developed stylish glasses to improve screen use and the quality of sleep. As their store grew larger, their customer base also expanded, and they began to research new ways to improve user experience in their store.
The Challenge
As they researched better ways to improve their store’s customer experience, SafetyBlue soon began to add more apps, codes to their Shopify stores. The purpose of doing this was to increase their store’s functionality, finding different apps for different functionalities.
However, as expected, the more apps they added to their store, the slower it got. This is usually because some apps require more time to communicate with Shopify’s API, while others need to communicate with less speedy servers. Eventually, all of this starts to spill over into the store’s speed, slowing it down tremendously.
This was the case with the SafetyBlue Shopify store. The more apps they added to their store, the more their page speed went up until it became almost impossible to use the site.
Another notable challenge was a huge reduction in their organic search traffic. New customers could no longer find the store through organic search as its slow site speed had caused it to drop several pages down in Google ranking.
A speed test run by the SafetyBlue team revealed a speed score below 30.
SafetyBlue had three demands; to increase their speed score, site ranking, and remove apps, not in use.
How SafetyBlue Came Across EcomExperts
EcomExperts has created tons of speed optimization videos and blogs. It was through one of such videos that SafetyBlue came across EcomExperts. After listening to Andrew describe the importance of a fast store and why it is necessary for merchants to regularly optimize their Shopify store speed, SafetyBlue immediately identified their slow store speed to be the cause of their problems.
Loved working with the SafetyBlue team to speed up their Shopify store. They were really clear with their demands, which helped us ensure we achieved their goals.
The team immediately got in contact with EcomExperts through our sales rep Angie. After a brief consultation, Angie sent over a contract and, once signed, began as their dedicated accounts manager.
Phenomenal start to finish. Will hire again in a heartbeat. 100% professional & knowledgeable, flexible and very quick to respond and finish the project quickly and timely.
How EcomExperts Sped Up The SafetyBlue Shopify Store
Once the contract was signed, Angie immediately handed over the job of speeding up the SafetyBlue Shopify store to Fatimah, one of our senior devs.
The first thing our team did was run the store through a series of speed tests. These tests revealed a mobile speed score of 11 and a desktop speed score of 24. The waterfall also revealed that the loading scripts used in the store were responsible for a large percentage of its speed performance issues. Fatimah started off by inserting lazy-loading scripts for apps, content for headers, and other non-critical scripts increasing the store’s speed score to fix this problem.
Moving on to the next demand, the team using the SafetyBlue waterfall, identified duplicate apps and apps, not in use on the store. Of the 30 apps in the store, over 15 of them were not in use, and an extra 5 were duplicate apps. These apps had clogged the store’s speed causing it to slow down tremendously. To fix this, we first identified the unused and duplicate apps; once we got them numbered down, we began uninstalling them one after the other, making sure to clean any codes left behind.
The speed optimization techniques used in cleaning the SafetyBlue store include:
- inlining critical CSS,
- preloading CSS
- deferring off-screen images
-managing APPS priority and applying lazy loading on other apps.
In general, Fatimah optimized essential and non-essential scripts on the store, making sure critical materials on the store load first regardless of how good/bad the network may be.
Worthy of note is that we also added a deliberate delay on non-critical scripts, images, and videos. This was to ensure that critical assets on the store load fast, enhancing user experience.
Results
It was all in a day's work for EcomExperts to speed up the SafetyBlueBlockers Shopify store. In only one day, our team was able to raise the store's mobile speed score of 81 and a desktop speed score of 97.
We also ensured that we used globally vetted and acceptable optimization techniques and scripts that met Google's requirements.
The new Google algorithm ranks sites using page user experience, this means that for your site to rank higher, users must find it easy to use your store. As such, it is necessary that you optimize your site speed for the best page user experience.
To get your page speed up and running, hire the best speed Optimization agency in the world. At EcomExperts, we offer you premium site optimization services ensuring your site users always have the best experience using your store.