Make your shop load faster
instantly

Why page speed matters

And why you need to fix it

Why pagespeed matters

Visitors to your shop can come from any number of places. As the result of a search engine query, the click on an ad, or from a post you have written on Facebook. Depending on the conditions, such as connection quality and the smart phone your visitor is using, the experience will differ a lot.

As your shop begins to load, the visitor has to wait for content to appear. Until the shop has loaded, the visitor is stuck in limbo and can do nothing except be annoyed, get angry or choose to drop your shop altogether. If your shop is fast the limbo is short and the user content - the best foundation for a sale.

We want visitors to buy our products. - Performance plays a major role in getting the sale. A slow shop has a negative impact on revenue, and the opposite is also true.

How does pagespeed affect SEO

Page speed is a search engine ranking factor. and with Google's Mobile First index being implemented all over the world, it has just become paramount.

Mobile browsing can be painful. Depending on connection quality and the state of your smart phone, the experience can and will differ a lot. With acronyms, such as 2G, 3G, 4G and now 5G you would think it should be possible to surf the internet with no problems at all! Not so! And it isn't set to change anytime soon. With more than 70% of all searches world wide being from a smartphone - Google knows! As much as a bad mobile experience hurts your business, Google's business is hurt more!

Mobile first indexing is their answer. Mobile-first indexing is simply how Google crawls and indexes the web. Instead of looking at the desktop version of your shop. Google now looks at the mobile version and is ranking it based on how fast it renders on a mobile phone. If your shop is slow to load, chances are you have already lost business because of it. Now you will loose your ranking in Google's SERPS as well.

How to increase page speed

Before you start working on your shop’s page speed, it’s a good idea to set a goal for where you want it to be.

According to Google, best practice is three seconds. Unfortunately, also according to Google most shops - in fact most web sites - are nowhere near that.

The analysis of more than 900,000 mobile pages from more than 126 countries found that 70% of the pages analyzed took nearly seven seconds to load. With 53% of visits abandoned if a shop takes longer than three seconds to load - you see the problem.

I hope your shop is doing better. If it's not, here is what you can do:

1. Make sure your web host is up to the task:

   If you run your shop on Shopify or BigCommerce you are in luck. If you run WooCommerce, Drupal, OpenCart, PrestaShop or Magento your luck has probably run out. And you need to do something about it. To check if you are "out of luck" you need to look at Server response time.

   1. The number you should look for is TTFB, or time to first byte. You need this number to be below 0.3 seconds.

   Shopify and BigCommerce run on big professional server farms so they have it covered. Unless you run Magento, WooCommerce, Drupal, OpenCart or PrestaShop on Nextel servers your TTFB will probably be higher. If so move your shop to a better host.

2. Make sure your shop is configured correctly:

   Even though Shopify is currently the fastest E-commerce system out there. They do this one wrong.

   1. Check that text compression has been enabled. In popular terms this is also called GZIP compression. This can more than double the speed of your shop, and vice versa if it is not activated.
   2. Check that browser caching is enabled. In todays world of very dynamic user interfaces this is not as important as it once was. But a speed improvement of 10% is not unheard of.

3. Avoid all redirects:

   Redirects slow down your page load speed! Redirects are typically caused by apps or plugins that takes you to another location based on some condition. Apps that do redirects are "Geo location" apps that take you from the current page to a country based page based on the visitors IP. Or "Translation" apps, that attempts to find the language of the visitor and translate the content of the page.

   1. Don't do it. Do separate pages or if needed create country specific shops.

4. Minimize the number of requests needed to show your shop:

   Simple is faster. Browser engineers recommend pages contain fewer than ~1,500 DOM nodes. The sweet spot is a tree depth < 32 elements and fewer than 60 children for each parent element. A large DOM can and will cause more memory to be used and take longer for the browser to render. This is a bit technical - what you need to understand is that themes, apps and plugins increase the number of DOM nodes, and increase the page load time.

   1. Choose simple themes with less functionality over decorated themes with more functionality.
   2. Never use more than 4 apps or plugins at any time. Test and choose only what you absolutely need.
   3. Choose layouts with fewer images over layouts with more images.

5. Compress your images and show them in the right size:

   Images in general make up between 50% and 75% of the total number of bytes in any given webpage. In most cases they are essential to getting the sale. According to SEO specialists CrazyEgg 66% of consumers want to see at least three product photos before buying. In light of my previous point, this also means that they do not need to see 20, between 3 and 6 will do and your shop will load that much faster.

   1. Make your images the right size for your layout. It does not benefit anyone to use thumbnails sized at 1024x1024 pixels if the max size they are shown in your shop are 100x100 pixels. Most E-commerce systems have the ability to size and resize images automatically, so that you don't have to. This is a link to how you can do it in Shopify.
   2. Compress your images before you upload them to your shop. You can use a service like TinyJpg or PageSpeed Guru. TinyJPG reduces the file size of your JPEG or PNG images. Every uploaded image is analyzed to apply the best possible JPEG encoding. Based on the content of your image an optimal strategy is chosen. The result is a quality image without wasting storage or bandwidth!

6. Reduce render blocking to a minimum:

   A fast shop gets you higher user engagement, more page views, and improves your conversion rate. You can improve your page speed by in-lining styles and scripts that are required to show the content above the fold and defer those that aren't. There are three types of render-blocking: scripts, stylesheets, and HTML imports.

   1. Consider in-lining scripts that are necessary to show content above the fold. All other scripts should be loaded with the async or the defer attributes.
   2. Consider in-lining style sheets that are necessary to show content above the fold. And move loading of all other style sheets to later.
   3. Consider splitting up your style sheets into different files, organized by media query, and then adding a media attribute to each stylesheet link. When loading a page, the browser only blocks the first paint to retrieve the stylesheets that match the user's device.
   4. For non-critical HTML imports, mark them with the async attribute. As a general rule, async should be used with HTML imports as much as possible.

7. Monitor your page speed relentlessly:

   As you work to improve your page speed, it’s a good idea to monitor how it changes over time. This is important even after you’ve achieved an acceptable page speed. Monitoring your page speed can help catch issues early, and keep your shop fast.

   PageSpeed Guru and Google Pagespeed insights give you the most comprehensive insights into how your shop is doing.

How does PageSpeed Guru work

PageSpeed Guru makes your shop faster automatically:

1. ... By reorganizing your theme files and load your shop in the fastest manner possible.
2. ... By preloading important resources for faster retrieval.
3. ... By removing render blocking caused by apps and make your shop load faster.
4. ... By pre-connecting to required ressources to eliminate latency and speed up load time.

No technical skill needed

Just 1 CLICK to run

Support

We test and maintain our apps relentlessly. Still, if you find a glitch or bug, just send a support request and we will fix it as soon as possible. At PageSpeed Guru we strive to deliver the best possible support. We will respond back to your support request within 48 hours. Every issue and problem will be addressed with the highest priority.

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