How can I improve the speed score of my store?

Your online store should get similar score as our demo store with the right amount of content and without unnecessary apps.

You might be wondering my online store speed is very slow as compare to demo store or other stores? Why it is slow? We have explained it below how important it is and how it can be improved.

It is important to have good speed score as it impact shopping experience of your customers and conversion rate and your store’s discoverability. Search engine also consider fastest loading site first. However if you will take a look at some of the most success online store, you will notice its speed score is too slow. Store success cannot be measure with its speed. Having low speed score does not mean unsuccessful store. Below you can check few most successful online stores with lower page speed score.

– Fashionnova
– Taylorstitch
– Triangle
– Kyliecosmetics
– Mvmt
– Allbirds

There are many factors that can impact your store performance including installed apps, amount of content you used on store, the speed of your network, and the Shopify platform itself. Themes are not always reason for the slow performance. We have developed all our themes with performance in mind. We have used small, compact and optimized code.

Here are various advice that you should absolutely follow if you want your store performance to improve.

Apps are the biggest factor that impacts theme performance

Each app adds its own code to the theme files which takes time to execute. Apps have been uninstalled also leave code behind that slows down your theme speed.

Remove apps that you do not use or are not essential. Apps are awesome as they add extra features on your store but they also add their own CSS and JavaScript code which makes slower store performance.

We highly recommend you to do an audit on a regular basis of all your apps, and remove the one you do not use. Thus limit the number of apps on your store. However few apps that do not impact your storefront have no impact on performance; for instance apps like financing apps, order printing app

Take care when you uninstall any app, because many apps can modify your theme code and the code(known as “dead code”) remain even when you remove the app that over time can affect the store performance. To effectively remove an app’s dead code, Please make sure to contact app developer’s support. Ask if there is any extra code need to remove from theme Or Take a look at their help docs. for uninstallation.

Amount of content used on store.

• Put less on the page. The larger a page is, the longer it takes for a page to load
• The features which make a page stand out can be the same ones that slow it down. Some of the heavy features are images, videos and custom fonts.
• Make sure you are using jpg images. png images are much larger and cannot be compressed as well as jpgs.
• Limit the number of products show on home. Home page loaded with ton of sections also takes longer to load. The more content you add, the more time it takes for Shopify to generate your page and the slower your performance. Recommended to have sections less than 8.
• Limit the number of slides in slideshow section. Slideshow also increased theme loading time as it is loaded with heavy images. We recommend not having more than 3 images.
• Adding custom fonts to your theme can result in longer load times. Try to avoid custom fonts use if not necessary.
• Some Shopify features directly impact performance. For instance, the “dynamic checkout button”, which allows your customers to buy in one click from the product page, impact the performance. You may consider trying to disable this feature.

Further Information

For more information, we recommend reading Shopify’s help pages – Improving Your Online Store Speed