Improving Your Online Shopify Store Speed
Updated June 21, 2021
How is Store Speed Determined?
When it comes to your Shopify store speed, there are factors in which you can and can’t control. To see where you stand, start by viewing your store’s speed, make sure you have the Reports and Theme staff permissions. From your Shopify admin, go to your online store and then Themes. In the Online Store Speed section, look at your speed score.
Luckily, there are more factors that you can control over ones that you can’t. For starters, you can’t control your customer’s devices or Shopify’s infrastructure. Some of your customers could be from around the world and use different devices or have slower internet speeds. Shopify uses fast, global services like Content Delivery Network (CDN), local browser cache, server-side page cache, and assets with liquid tags in your headings. Overall, Shopify is doing their part in making your store as fast as it can be worldwide, but are you maximizing what you can do on your end?
Factors You Can Control
Apps - disable or remove app features that you don’t use
Themes - disable or remove theme features that you don’t use and consider using a system font
Theme or App Features - use a heatmap tool to see if customers are using certain features and disable the ones they are not
Complex or Inefficient Liquid Code - the more complicated the code, the more it can slow down your store speed
Images and Videos - slow loading can come from oversized images and images are hidden from a customer’s view can disrupt more important aspects of your page
Fonts - using a font that is nonexistent on a customers computer, makes them have to download the font to be displayed and impacts the time and ability it takes for your store to load
Shopify’s Online Store Speed report uses Lighthouse to help determine the speed of your store. You are able to also view this on Google PageSpeed Insights for a more in-depth analysis of your metrics. You also are able to use the Shopify Theme Inspector for Chrome, which is a profiling tool to show Liquid render performance from using flame graphs. Essentially, this means that it can help you decide which specific lines of code slow down your store’s pages.
You can also use free resources like our Shopify 101 tutorials to get started and selling online in less than a day. When setting up your Shopify store, we recommend the “Basic Plan.” You’ll have to answer a few questions and add your credit card or PayPal address, but you won’t be billed until your trial period is over, in which case you will be sent reminders!