Speed up Your Shopify Website & Improve CWV

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Being a competitor in the eCommerce industry is not easy for businesses. There is just too much competition these days, and you need to be at the top of your game. Your website is everything when it comes to reaching out to customers and finding leads. 

But as time goes on, your website begins to slow down. In a competitive market, becoming slow is a huge issue. Users are a lot pickier these days, and they will click away from your website. This is one critical reason to improve your Core Web Vitals (CWV).

Simply put, CWV analyzes how your pages perform in a real-world scenario. It reflects the performance of your website on a more realistic scale. You can read more about it from Google themselves.

Let's look at a few tips to improve loading speed across your website. 

7 Tips for Improve the Page Loading Speed of your Shopify Website

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1. Opt For The Right Theme

This is perhaps one of the simplest things to do, but you need to know what you're doing. Choosing a theme can be done with a simple click, but you need to decide by weighing many factors. The wrong theme can slow down your website and lose business for you.

Tips To Choose The Right Theme

Themes for websites are numerous - there are hundreds of thousands of them around. Choosing the right one for your Shopify website is an arduous task. There are two ways you can go about with themes for your eCommerce website. 

One way is to download paid themes that are available online and tweak them to what you want. The other is to create a theme from scratch. The latter is challenging, and you need a team by your side to get it done. 

• Download premium themes from websites like ThemeForest. They might be expensive, but you get support since they offer it as a service. 
• There are also tools to make your themes, like Themes Generator and iThemes Builder.
• Whatever you choose or create, ensure that it is simple and fits your purpose.

Here’s a screenshot of ThemeForest:

2. Simplify Your Landing/Home Page

Another area where you can improve loading speed is your page architecture. The simpler you keep your landing page and homepage, the better it is for your users. The reason is that they don't need to sift through a lot of data to find what they want. 

Keeping Your Web Pages Simple

Ecommerce is all about keeping people on your page and interested. If you keep them on your pages long enough, they will eventually buy a product. Here, simplicity is a key element in getting them to stay on and not click away. 

Ensure that your users can get the most information from your website in the shortest time. Structure it so they read all the important parts correctly. Don't saturate the page with too many complex visual elements. 

• Decide on the architecture of your website before you start designing. This could be inspired by your competitors as well. 
• It is important to A/B test different layouts for the best one. 
• Keep your mind open to the thoughts of several different design layouts. 

You can use Google Analytics to run A/B tests:

3. Analyze Installed Addons

Any eCommerce website needs to have a set of addons. They offer a lot of flexibility and features that you cannot ignore. But when you have too many of them installed, it can take a toll on your loading speed. The key is to audit your addons regularly. 

Streamlining Your Apps

Removing unused apps is a great way to speed up your website's loading times. Some of these apps can take up many resources that slow websites. However, you cannot simply remove them without proper analysis of your existing website. 

They might be connected with other important functions, resulting in bigger issues. Spend time analyzing your app infrastructure and determine which affects your website negatively. 

• Ahrefs has a module that can help you optimize your app profile. 
• GTMetrix is another option that can deliver accurate insights about your website. 
• Google Page Insights is the simplest solution to find out which apps you need to disable. 

Here’s a screenshot of Google Page Insights:

4. Minify All Website Code

To increase website loading speed, minification is something that all eCommerce businesses do for their websites. It is a technique that can reduce the amount of code needed to render a website. It can considerably reduce overheads during page loading. 

Strategies To Implement Minification

Code minification is one of the best ways to reduce website loading times. Today, almost all eCommerce brands use minification at various levels to accelerate their websites. This leads to better engagement and improved sales across their business. 

While it is true that minification can reduce loading times, it also has several other advantages. One important benefit is that it reduces data consumption for the user. This is something that cannot be overlooked.

• Minification reduces superfluous characters in JS, CSS, and HTML for a website.
• Minifier is a simple and lightweight tool that can help you reduce your website size. 
• Google Closure Compiler is another option to implement minifying. 

Here’s a screenshot of Minifier:

5. Reduce DNS Lookups

A problem that is uniquely applicable to eCommerce is DNS lookups. Since there are several connected domains in an eCommerce framework, too many lookups will slow downloading. If you want to reduce the loading time of your website, fewer DNS lookups can help.

Tips To Reduce Lookup Requests

DNS requests can quickly add up if you're an eCommerce website. Depending on the number of people logged on, it can be hundreds of thousands per second. If you're an eCommerce brand that spans the globe, you need to take care of this. 

There are different solutions to this problem. Not all of them are straightforward, but it needs to be done. The simplest would be to choose a marketing agency and let them handle it. An agency has the expertise and the manpower to get your website loading quicker. 

• Reduce the number of hostnames that you use.
• Get a fast DNS provider that can automatically reduce the number of lookups. 
• Tweak your TTL values in your DNS cache files. 
• Using a CDN provider will reduce lookups as well. 

Here’s an example of what DNS settings look like:

6. Optimize Images And Video

Images and videos help engage clients. This is a no-brainer with an eCommerce website. The problem is that you also need to factor in delays in loading time with these. Optimization of these content types is a huge factor in reducing loading times on your website. 

Effective Image And Video Content

For a content medium to be effective, it needs to load quickly and have the intended effect. The quality needs to be high, but you always need to be wary of the loading time as a business. High-resolution video can have huge file sizes and is difficult to load. 

The key here is to optimize images and video to make them load quicker. It also involves adding the right meta tags to have SEO strength. 

• You can optimize video content with Camtasia. It retains quality while lowering the file size.
• Adobe Photoshop is the staple for image editing platforms. Canva is an online-only alternative. 
• Google Trends can help you organize keywords and hashtags for the content. 

Here’s a screenshot of Canva:

7. Use Google Tag Manager

Like its namesake, the Tag Manager is a place where you can manage your website tags. It uses logical containers from which you can operate and organize tags. While it might sound simple, it offers a new and powerful layer of website control. 

Using Tag Manager Effectively

There are several ways you can manipulate your website tags. You can use specific tags to trigger during an event. Once triggered, it can show a snippet having that corresponding data. So you could add in a trigger for page views and display that on your analytics. 

With these tags, you can shave important milliseconds off your loading time. This is incredibly useful, but you need to know what you're doing. 

• Google Tag Manager is a recent development but well-received by everyone. 
• Moving your Tags from the web to your server container can improve loading speed. 
• This might not make much of an impact if there are unoptimized elements on your website.

Here’s a screenshot of Google Tag Manager:

Shopify Page Speed Optimization - FAQs

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1. What Are The Advantages Of My Website Loading Quickly?

Quicker loading times mean better engagement and lower bounce rates. These can directly improve your revenue stream and result in higher conversions. Faster websites also rank higher on search results. 

2. How Can I Speed Up My Shopify Website?

There are several methods by which you can ensure a quicker loading website. This article has highlighted several areas where you might want to look. 

3. Are There Tools That Can Help My Shopify Website Load Quicker?

You can use all-inclusive tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to improve website loading speed. But the key is to know how to tweak your website for good results effectively. 

4. What Are The Top 3 Tips For Quicker Loading Websites?

Reducing the loading time of a website is dependent on many factors for an eCommerce website. The top tips would be -

• Choosing the right theme and font
• Ensuring that your website code is minified, and
• Opting for a fast DNS service provider

Key Takeaways

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• Keep the design of your website simple for quicker loading.
• Use tools that can help you optimize several aspects of your website at once. 
• Ensure that you've analyzed all your apps for usage and compatibility.
• Getting a high-quality DNS provider has a noticeable effect on loading times.
• Quicker loading websites are ranked higher and deliver better business.