How to Speed Up a Shopify Website: 10 Tips for 2024

Learning how to speed up a Shopify website is one of the best things you can do to improve your store’s chances of success. Faster-loading websites not only help you to convert more customers, but they can also increase brand loyalty, and give you an edge over the competition.

While Shopify offers numerous features and tools designed to keep your pages loading quickly, there are steps you can take to turbocharge your site’s performance.

Here are our top tips for speeding up Shopify website, inspired by years of experience working with Shopify stores.

Why Speed Optimization is Important for Your Shopify Website

Today’s ecommerce customers demand speed. No matter what target audience you’re focusing on, you can rest assured that your buyers are looking for fast, convenient experiences on your store.

Learning how to speed up your Shopify website doesn’t just make your site look more reliable and professional, it’s crucial to capturing and converting customers.

Studies show a single 0.1 second reduction in page load times can be enough to increase the conversion rate of your online store by 8.4%. Plus, customers spend up to 10% more on a site with excellent store speed. Other reports support these findings.

For instance, one study found ecommerce sites that load within one second have 2.5 times higher conversion rates than those that take 5 seconds to load a page. Making sure your website loads quickly improves your customer’s experience, leading to stronger relationships with buyers.

Plus, the right strategy can improve your SEO performance too. Google, the world’s biggest search engine, prioritizes sites which deliver a great user experience, and have strong core web vitals.

Site speed can even have an impact on the ROI of your marketing campaigns. Slow-loading landing pages can lower your Google Ads Quality Score, meaning you pay more for each click. Plus, they can cause your bounce rate to skyrocket.

What tools you can Use to optimize your Shopify Website?

The good news for Shopify store owners, is the ecommerce platform is already optimized for excellent website speed. Shopify sites usually have good loading speeds, thanks to high-quality hosting, and streamlined code.

There are various tools, available through Shopify, and integrations, that can help you optimize site speed too, such as:

• Browser caching: Caching allows some of your website content to be stored within a user’s browser locally. This means they don’t have to load images, videos, and other content every time they arrive on your website, leading to faster results.
• Speed reporting tools: You can use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, or the Shopify Site Speed result to run a speed test, and track how well your website is performing. Shopify’s report uses Lighthouse to check the overall speed of your store, and offer suggestions on how you can improve website performance.
• CDNs: Content Delivery Networks help to quickly distribute your site content to different regions around the globe. Shopify offers access to a popular content delivery network, known as Cloudflare, which can help store owners deliver pages and files faster.
• Image compression tools: Compression tools like TinyPNG or TinyJPG allow store owners to compress large images without compromising on quality. Since large images often damage your Shopify speed score, these tools can be crucial to your site’s performance.
• Broken link checkers: A broken link checker can draw attention to page elements like JavaScript files, CSS that increase HTTP requests and harm your site speed. If you find broken links, you can replace them to overcome performance issues.

Top 10 Shopify Speed Optimization tips

While Shopify sites are generally designed to deliver exceptional performance to store owners and customers, there are various factors that can harm or influence your Shopify store speed.

If you’re worried your website isn’t loading as quickly as other ecommerce stores, here are our top tips for optimizing your site’s performance.

1. Choose a Fast-Loading Theme

Your choice of Shopify theme has a direct impact on how quickly your web pages can load. Some themes are designed for speed, offering lightweight code, streamlined system fonts, and compressed images.

Most free Shopify themes, as well as various premium versions, will offer excellent high-speed performance, but it’s worth double checking your theme’s performance before you choose it.

Prioritize a responsive theme that supports great Google Core Web Vital scores, such as the Turbo, Fastor, or Flex theme. If you customize your theme with Liquid code, CSS, HTML, or JavaScript, consider working with a Shopify expert to minimize code loops and other performance issues.

2. Reduce, Resize, and Compress Images

Images are great for capturing, engaging, and converting customers, but they also account for up to 75% of your website’s total weight. The more images you add to your product pages, landing pages, and other environments, the more weight you add to your store.

This is why it’s crucial to ensure you optimize images for optimal performance. Where possible:

• Reduce the number of images on your site: A single hero image can be just as impactful as an entire carousel of visual elements. Don’t use unnecessary images.
• Compress images: Compressing images with tools like TinyPNG or TinyJPG means you can reduce their size, without harming the quality of the content. There are even certain Shopify apps like Crush.pics which can automatically compress images for you.
• Reduce image sizes: Avoid uploading images at a size that’s much larger than you really need. Use Shopify’s built-in image size parameters to download the smallest version of an image.

3. Replace GIFs with Static Images

A GIF can be a good way to grab customer attention, particularly when its used in place of a standard hero image. However, GIFs have a higher impact on your website’s performance than standard, static photos. The more GIFs you add to your site, the more weight you’ll have in each page.

Just a few different GIFs on a single page can be enough to add more than 10MB of data to a product page or home page. Where possible, consider replacing your GIFs with static images, or sliders featuring compressed, carefully resized images.

You could also consider replacing some GIFs with optimized videos, particularly if you host those videos outside of your Shopify website.

4. Enable Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a web design technique that prevents all of the content on a page from immediately loading at the same time when customers arrive on your site.

Typically, when a customer arrives on a website page, the content “above the fold” loads first, because its what customers see straight away.

Supporting content then loads when a user begins to scroll down through the page. With lazy loading tools on Shopify, you can define which parts of a website page should load the fastest.

Ideally, you’ll want to load the most valuable content first, such as your product images, headlines, and call-to-action buttons. Focus on which fast-loading elements will give your users the best experience.

5. Use Lite Embeds for Videos

Videos, like GIFs, can be another excellent way to engage and convert customers. They’re becoming increasingly common on Shopify stores, with around 91% of companies using video as a marketing tool. Unfortunately, videos carry a lot of weight.

If you want to add them to your ecommerce website, without compromising on Shopify page speed, consider “lite embeds”.

Lite embeds allow you to load videos directly on your webpage, without using the full standard embed code from YouTube and similar apps.

With a lite embed, when your page initially loads, the site only embeds the thumbnail image from YouTube into your site. The video player, and additional JavaScript only loads when your user clicks this thumbnail.

6. Limit Third-Party Apps

One of the reasons many business owners choose Shopify to build their ecommerce website, is the platform is extremely flexible. It comes with a huge app marketplace, brimming with tools for everything from social media marketing to customer service management.

However, while apps can bring extra functionality to your Shopify store, they also come with extra code your website needs to load.

Too many apps and scripts running in the background of your website can place significant pressure on your site’s performance.

With this in mind, it’s worth being cautious about the number of apps you use. Before installing anything new, ask yourself how much the app will benefit your potential customers, and whether there’s a more lightweight option available.

7. Move Tracking Codes to Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is an extremely useful tool for Shopify store owners. It allows users to easily add and remove tags from their website, without having to edit the code.

With Google Tag Manager in Shopify, you can manage all of your website’s tracking codes in one place. Plus, you can ensure the codes load “asynchronously”, limiting the impact on your site’s content.

Migrating your tracking links to Google Tag Manager is simple. Just add the app to your Shopify store, and visit the “Tags” section to find tag types. Implement your chosen tags into Tag Manager, and set your triggering guidelines.

You can even test how well your new tags are working, by using the “Preview” mode in Google Tag Manager. Remember, you can move various tracking pixels into the same environment, from pixels from Facebook (Meta) to those from Google Analytics.

8. Implement AMP

9 in 10 Americans under the age of 50 say they shop for products using their mobile devices. This means you need to ensure your website isn’t just performing well on desktop browsers, but on mobile browsers too. Implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a great way to do this.

Google created AMP as a solution to enhance user experiences for people browsing the web through mobile devices and tablets. You can use the AMP app to convert sections of your Shopify store, index pages with Google, and deliver an almost instant page loading time.

According to Google, using AMP helps to double the time customers spend on website pages, and increases conversions by 20%.

9. Invest in Expert Assistance

Shopify is an easy-to-use and reliable ecommerce platform, that companies can use with virtually no coding knowledge. However, if you’re struggling with bad scores on your Shopify speed report, it might be helpful to access help from an expert.

Professionals can dive into your Shopify store code to eliminate various problems. They can get rid of render-blocking issues in JavaScript and CSS files, which can improve page loading times. Plus, they can help you minify JavaScript and HTML.

Some Shopify experts can even help with simpler tasks, like image optimization, or minifying image files for different product pages.

10. Reduce Broken Links and Redirects

Finally, as mentioned above, too many broken links and redirects can have a serious impact on your site’s performance. They can also harm your company’s reputation, and reduce your SEO rankings.

As your website grows, and you create new pages, make sure everything is working properly.

Use tools like “Broken Link Checker” to search for broken links and redirects on your website, and consider replacing them with 301 (cacheable redirects) and custom 404 error pages.

This approach should help to improve your site’s performance, and deliver a much-needed boost in other metrics, like time spent on pages, and customer satisfaction.

Speed Up Your Shopify Website – Conclusion

The faster your Shopify website loads, the better your conversion rates and customer loyalty levels will be. Fortunately, you don’t necessarily need to upgrade to Shopify Plus, or invest in expensive tools to enhance your website’s performance.

Simple strategies, like reducing the file size of your images, using AMP, or experimenting with caching and CDNs can make a huge difference to your site’s performance. Use the tips above to optimize your website, and watch your profits grow.