Optimizing your store speed makes every visit to your page more profitable for you and your audience. Optimizing your Shopify site speed regularly removes any obstacles that may create an unpleasant experience for site users.
Site speed optimization increases the conversion rates, search ranking, and profits of any Shopify store. It also does a lot for customer experience; for one, a fast-loading store means your customers have nothing to complain about. They can easily find what they're looking for on your store within minutes of searching.
Whether they need to find a product description page, an FAQ page, or checkout, they can do all of this conveniently, even on slow internet.
So when's the right time?
As an eCommerce owner, you may be confused as to when the right time is to optimize your Shopify store. The answer is simple; Do it now, and do it regularly.
Treat Shopify site speed optimization like a bath. It is very much needed after a stressful day, true, but would you only shower if you had a rough day? Of course not!
Many Shopify store owners believe that Shopify speed optimization is reserved for the period before the holiday sales begin, and this is mainly true. For a fully optimized site, website speed optimization must become a part of your monthly routine for your website.
Cleaning up your site just before the holidays ensures your site performs excellently during the sales. Still, it can be compared to dusting your carpet just once or twice a year. It may be clean that week, but give it a couple of weeks, and it's screaming for another beat down.
What Happens When I Don't Optimize My Store?
- Lesser sales: Failing to optimize your Shopify site speed means your page takes longer to load. For every second added to your page load time, you lose a potential customer. This increases bounce rates and decreases conversions, popularly known signs of backsliding sales.
- Lower Google rankings: The new Google Core Web Vitals update places site speed as a core factor for site ranking. What this means is that Google now ranks faster stores first over slow ones. As such, regardless of how good your SEO copy is, you might find your Shopify store ranked below other competitors. Site speed affects SEO, so having a site that hasn't been optimized in a while will affect your page rankings negatively. And as your page ranking is responsible for some percentage of traffic, you will notice that fewer people visit your site.
- Prone to hacking: Because Shopify speed optimization involves trimming and cleaning codes, it helps keep hackers away. On the other hand, if you let "weeds" (leftover and unused codes)" grow in your Shopify code, your store remains a prime target for hackers.
- Site crashes: Imagine creating hype for your biggest sale of the year, but on said day, only 30 minutes into the sale, your store crashes, and you have to spend hours scrambling to find every way to get it up. At this point, you have created a huge problem affecting your brand and profits, a problem that could have been avoided.
Site crashes are every e-commerce merchant's worst nightmare. If your store remains unoptimized even after prolonged use, it is likely to pack up when you need it the most.
What We Do?
At EcomExperts, we pride ourselves on being a world class Shopify speed optimization agency. Our top-notch, expertly tailored speed maintenance services include:
- Fast UI/UX, page loading time under 3 seconds
- Web core vitals auditing resulting in higher Mobile and Desktop scores
- A guarantee of a score above 80 in PageSpeed Insights Report and a score above 90 in GTMetrix, for both desktop and mobile
- Removal of redundant codes
- Store cleanup; removal of unused templates, theme files, unlinked online stores, etc
- Restructure sections and optimization of codes
- Image optimization, including resizing
- Application of lazy loading, apps, scripts, CSS, and Javascript priority settings
- Minification of Javascript and CSS files