Speed Optimization Best Practises Ebook by Swift
Speed Optimization Best Practises Ebook by Swift
Page Speed
Optimization
To Maximize Sales
5. Optimize fonts 12
8. Disable pop-ups 15
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 25
An e-book by Swift | 03
Introduction
important to
conversion rate?
So what is page speed? And why is boosting page speed a must-do task? Before we serve
you the book’s main course, let us briefly address the two questions above so you could
know why page speed optimization so so matters to your Shopify store’s conversion rate.
2. Why is page speed important? How does page speed affect SEO &
conversion rates?
Faster page speed will potentially lead to lower bounce rates, higher conversion rates,
higher ranking in organic search and a better user experience for customers.
12 case studies that demonstrated user expectations of site performance were examined
by Skilled reveal:
Î 79% of customers who are "dissatisfied" with a site's functionality are less inclined to
Î A web page should load in 4 seconds or less, according to 64% of smartphone usersq
Î A web page should load in 2 seconds or less, according to 47% of online buyers.
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In today's fiercely competitive market, the significance of increasing your page speed directly
Chief among the negative effects of sluggish eCommerce page speed are:
The percentage of people that first visit a Your searchability is badly impacted by
website and then quickly leave it without slow-loading sites. According to SEO
taking any other actions is known as the specialists, sluggish pages harm organic
"bounce rate." Pages that load in under 2 rankings across all devices.
Google claims that a drop in page speed that slow sites make it difficult for them to
from 1 seconds to 10 seconds causes a 123% rank higher on Google. In fact, Google
rise in bounce rates for eCommerce stores. devalues a website's SERP value when users
Visitors will quit an online store right away eCommerce store? This can have a negative
and switch to one of its competitors impact on your store's traffic, revenues, and
which will negatively affect how Google The term “session” refers to a period of time a
session, a user can generate multiple page views, interactions and more importantly, transactions.
Therefore, shorter sessions means your potential customers spend less time browsing your
According to Portent, the first 5 seconds of a page loading have the most influence on conversion
rates. In addition, conversion rates tend to decline by 4.42% for every extra second.
Otherwise, web performance optimizers Crazyegg discovered through customer experiments that
In general, low conversion rates are definitely the worst drawback of a slow page speed since it
It's important to evaluate the performance of your page speed before making any
changes that may affect how it loads and manages information.
Let’s begin to test your page speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights. This Google tool
not only delivers information on a page's performance on desktop and mobile devices,
but it also makes recommendations for how to make the page load faster.
Your Core Web Vitals will be evaluated on a desktop or mobile device (by default), and it
will let you know whether your website passes or not. It will then display a color-coded
score that reflects the general effectiveness of your page:
As of writing this ebook, the 3 most important pillars of page experience arex
vu Loading performance: how fast does content appear on your siteq
ou Responsiveness: how fast does your website react to user actionq
u Visual stability: does your page’s content move around on the loading screen?
And in order to measure the 3 key factors above, Google uses 3 so-called “core web vitals” as
following
% Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures how long it takes for the largest content on your
website to be fully displayed on users’ screenJ
$% First Input Delay (FID) measure how long it takes for your website to respond to users’ input
(e.g: click Shop Now button on Homepage
>% Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures how stable your content is while loading
The infographic below will help you have a better understanding of the 3 core web vitals metrics:
Home > sales > hoodie Home > sales > hoodie Home > sales > hoodie
Plaid Sleeve Hoodie Plaid Sleeve Hoodie Home > sales > hoodie
$ 67 $138
$ 67 $138
Plaid Sleeve Hoodie
qty 2 $ 67
Besides, you can make use of website benchmarking, a vital strategy that will tell you how your
site compares to others. This can be used to determine whether your page speed is good enough
in comparison to others so that you can develop your strategic strategy and monitor its progress.
United States
Travel 6 sec
Go to Google Page Speed Industry Benchmarks if you want to see average page speed by
industry in other countries as well
Although images can enhance the appearance of your page, they can slow down the loading
speed, especially if they are high resolution. Compressing these images before adding them to
your page can save valuable weight and loading time.
Many photo-editing tools now have "save for web" options that optimize photos for websites.
Besides, there are free, online-based options available for compressing popular file types (.JPG,
.PNG, and .TIFF) such as TinyJPG or TinyPNG.
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In addition to images, videos can be a great tool to brighten up your Shopify store. But adding
videos improperly on your website will negatively impact your page speed.
So here are 2 handy tips to make your video content more page speed friendly:
1. Embed Youtube or Vimeo URLs to your website. Since your videos are hosted on Youtube or
Vimeo, you don’t have to host large video files on your server. Plus, when you embed a Youtube
URL on your Shopify store, Shopify will automatically apply deferred loading (aka lazy loading) to
your videos, which we’ll discuss more below.
2. Replace GIFs with videos or static images: GIFs can be funny when you see them as memes
on social media. But these files can be a burden to your store speed. This is because GIFs files
can be 20 times larger than static images and much larger than videos.
A web page will load slowly and take longer to fully load when it contains too many elements.
Customers typically only look at around half of the content on a store's home page. You do not
want to face the risk of losing them because of abundant elements on your homepage that
visitors don’t need.
The design of your Shopify homepage should only include elements that enhance user
experience and add value for visitors. The following criteria should be used to determine the
necessity of each component on your homepage:
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. Easy navigation: Visitors should be able to effortlessly browse via your store's interface
. Attractiveness: Each image and video on your homepage should draw visitors’ attention and
encourage them to stay in your shop or purchase your goods
. Value: Your homepage needs to provide information that can cover customers’ demands,
problems, inquiries, and desires
. Call to Action: Your CTA needs to be strong, distinct, noticeable, and simple to understand
. Trustworthiness: You should include social proof as it can make a big contribution to your
brand's reputation and helps to develop trust in your customers.
Thus, you should remove any elements that are not necessary and don't fit these criteria. To cut
down on the items on your homepage, you can use a preview and view more links. Also, think
about relocating widgets and social media feeds from your homepage to other key areas of
your website.
To get more insights into how users interact with your homepage, you could use a heatmap tool
such as Lucky Orange Heatmaps & Replay, Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar to find out which elements
on the homepage are critical and which are not.
Rotating image sliders and carousels are not only a conversion killer but also a website
accessibility problem as they take a long time to load.
Sliders consist of a bunch of huge images that load simultaneously and need additional
Javascript to function. As a result, your bandwidth is quickly depleted by all those assets.
In addition to poor loading times, many sliders are not mobile-optimized. Slider graphics that look
good on a desktop computer can be impossible to read when resized for mobile devices. Visitors
will undoubtedly leave your page with a negative impression if you combine this with the irritation
of having to swipe left and right between slides on a smartphone.
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You’d better reduce or remove your homepage slides. All you need is one eye-popping and high
quality hero image with a bold call to action, which helps bring your customers in immediately.
However, if you still want to use a slider, you should learn about UX/UI best practices and strictly
5. Optimize fonts
For the text in your Shopify store, you have a variety of fonts to choose from. However, if you
choose a font that isn’t supported by default on your customer's computer, your website then
needs to download the font first before showing it on the screen. This slows down your page
speed.
Instead, you can utilize a system font to prevent your customer's computer from having to
download a new font. A system font is one that most computers come pre-installed with.
Select Theme Settings > Typography > Select the font you want to change
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There are many options available for you, including a mono, serif, or sans-serif font family. When
choosing any of these font families, you can still use font styles like bold or italic. The operating
system of your customer determines the font that appears on their computer.
Besides, using web fonts is a rising trend in web design. They are fonts that are not installed on a
user's computer and have to be downloaded from a web server using the CSS3 @font-face
declaration and must be supported by the web browser.
Since you may utilize fonts from other websites, like Google, on your store, web fonts are helpful.
Unfortunately, web fonts cannot make your website stand out from the crowd and they can have
a negative effect on performance, especially if they're unusual or need special character sets.
Therefore, you should only use the fewest number of web fonts possible, and focus on fonts that
are optimized for speed to increase page loading speed.
For your convenience, you can have a look at the Case Study of Analyzing Web Font
Performance where you can find the top 10 fastest Google web fonts with Open Sans
having the fastest load time of 0.476 seconds only.
In order to handle your online operations more effectively and provide a better user experience,
apps are a terrific addition to your website. However, the bulk of apps that can be downloaded
through Shopify add some JavaScript/CSS files to your store, which is a big concern.
The JavaScript/CSS files are still active in the background even if you are not using the app,
which slows down the performance of your site.
Therefore, you need to review your store and think about deleting any unused apps from it. There
are two straightforward steps you can take:
k Remove any app features that don't relate to your store or disable those that you no longer useV
k Consider removing any code that was included during the installation process if you're going to
delete an app. Some apps help you with this process by including the app name in the {%
Deleting unneeded app code prevents running code for features that aren’t used and makes
your theme code easier to comprehend.
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The removal of unnecessary app code makes your theme code easier to understand and stops
running code for features that aren't used. If you struggle to do this on your own. You can
In the end, you can think of choosing the apps that have low impact to your online store
performance when searching around in the Shopify App store. Those apps will have an honored
badge “Speed tested: no impact to your online store” in the App highlights section below the Add
app button.
Or you can use the multi-functional apps which offer you different features all in one place.
For example, you can opt for Transcy, an app that allows you to convert both store languages
These actions are like preventions so that you would not be worried too much about deleting
To make your store high performant, sometimes you cannot remove any app. Sadly, too
many scripts from too many apps can affect your page speed negatively. With
OneExperts, we analyze the apps loaded on your website, defer and monitor them to
Lazy loading, aka deferred loading is when you delay the loading of photos that are outside of
what the user is currently viewing on the page.
For instance, since a user won't view the photos below the fold when they first arrive at a website,
they don't need to load immediately.
This technique allows for a shorter "critical rendering route," which in turn speeds up page load
times. It often happens when a user scrolls or navigates on your page. It will make customers
think your page is loading more quickly than it actually is.
With our Swift application, you can instantly lazy load all your images and videos without
you having to insert a single line of code.
If handled improperly, pop-ups won’t help boost your conversion. In fact, a pop-up that shows up
when a page loads will increase your reported "load time" and affect your page speed score.
This is because the popup will be regarded as your largest content on the page (Largest
Contentful Paint or LCP).
So in order to reduce the impact of pop-ups on your website, we recommend showing your
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pop-ups to customers only after the page has finished loading. (~10 to 20 seconds)
What about Quick View pop-ups? Are they bad for your page
speed?
If you’re using a paid Shopify theme, you probably want to enable the Quick View feature
for your product listing on Homepage or Collection Page. However, be well-noted that
this kind of pop-up is bad for your page speed and your SEO too.
Whether you add a pop-up natively with your theme or using an app, a quick view pop-
up will preload the information from a whole Product Detail Page (PDP) when your
customers click the Quick View button. That’s a massive amount of data to be loaded,
especially if your collection page has up to 30 product listings.
So it’s recommended that you track whether your customers really use the Quick View
buttons or not. If not, turn them off for the sake of your page speed performance.
The perceived speed of your page is how quickly users think it to be. Although it won't directly
affect your score rate, it can make your customers more satisfied with their online shopping
experience.
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Prefetching and preloading tactics can help you improve how quickly users perceive your page.
These tactics will determine which page on your website a user is most likely to visit next or which
link is most likely to be clicked. Accordingly, your website can preload resources only when they
are likely to be needed and serve the page to users immediately and without delay.
You can preload content using a variety of methods, including DNS prefetching, TCP
preconnecting, prefetching, and prerendering. The problem is that you need to have coding
knowledge in order to use these techniques. Therefore, using a third-party app is a terrific idea if
dynamically develop a predictive model. This model is then used to smartly prefetch only
Incorrect HTML coding, extra Javascript libraries, and unnecessary CSS all lead to slowing down
your page load time. The browser takes longer to load when there are code errors because it has
to search for things it can't see. The website has to work harder to load elements that might not
be necessary for the user experience because of extra JavaScript and unneeded CSS.
Therefore, it's crucial to minify these files to improve the speed of your Shopify store and enhance
customer experience. Minification means removing excessive data in a way that will not impact
how the browser uses the given resource. This process could refer to removing unused code and
Too many redirects and broken links may be the cause of the poor performance issue because
they might slow down your page and affect your SEO rankings. In other words, you must refrain
from using unneeded redirects and update broken links if you wan’t faster loading site.
Broken links
Since broken links on your website increase HTTP requests and slow down your site, they can be
detrimental to your business and detract from the user experience.
We encourage you to use the Google Webmaster Tool to register for your Shopify store, then
check it for broken links, and generate functional redirects using the URL Redirect feature in the
store admin panel.
Or you could use Ahrefs to check your broken links, as shown below:
Redirects
Redirects are primarily made to improve user experience by sending users away from broken or
dead links and onto a more relevant live page. Nevertheless, every redirect raises page overhead
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According to Google’s Mobile Analysis in PageSpeed Insights, an extra HTTP redirect could add 1 or
2 additional network round trips, posing hundreds of milliseconds of extra latency on 4G networks.
Unnecessary redirects cause page performance and speed issues, which may slow down the
website's overall load time. So make sure you only use redirects when they are really necessary to
Check out the stats by Statista below to understand how critical it is to enhance the user
H Global smartphone subscriptions topped 6 billion in 2021, and in the future, that number is
H Mobile-commerce has accounted for 72.9% of all retail eCommerce in 2021, up from 58.9% in
2017.
72.9%
topped 6 billion
in 2021
You must make your Shopify store mobile-friendly given the widespread use of mobile devices. By
incorporating AMP into your Shopify website, you can accomplish this.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open standard framework created to enable any publisher
your page speed. This is because the ultimate goal of AMP is to improve user experience by
But how ? AMP works by breaking down your pages by most crucial elements and storing a more
I
f your Shopify website offers an AMP version, your customers will be automatically redirected to
However, with the AMP version, features like videos, ads, animations will be removed, allowing the
pages to load faster with only text and images. That’s why you shouldn’t use AMP on pages with
high-traffic or high-converting pages where you need to do branding or generate more leads.
But if you struggle to improve your page speed and most of your customers use mobile devices,
enabling AMP for your Shopify store can be a wise move.
To save you from the coding part, here are some handy Shopify apps that allow you to do so
 AMP by Shop Sherif°
 The AMP ap¹
 Fire AMP
Examine your theme to see because it is also a factor that affects your page speed. In fact, your
theme is frequently the cause of site slowdown because it has a lot of features and coding, such
as Liquid, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Moreover, editing and customizing themes can result in larger file sizes, which can affect how
quickly your site loads.
Thus, it is vital to go for a lightweight theme when you want to install one. Particularly, lightweight
Shopify themes for online stores are typically well-coded and speed-tested for websites.
You can run the URL of your favorite Shopify theme's preview page through the Google
PageSpeed Insights database to see if it has minimal loading time.
To save you time, you can choose among our selected options of the fastest Shopify themes
 Boosteä  Shelló
 ShoptimizeÞ Â Plak
 Debut
An e-book by Swift | 21
Additionally, it is advisable to check if your pick is up to date before using it on your Shopify web
Now, you have some best practices to implement to your page in order to boost its speed.
Whatever you choose, remember to analyze your page performance to see if the practice is
working.
Once again, you may need help from online testing tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insight,
These tools will provide you with a number of different statistics so that you can easily sort out
the important ones to your page and break them down. You will have deep insights into your
By paying close attention to page performance analysis, you can make instant adjustments to
your page, avoiding long-term impact on your business. Besides, you can precisely target the
real causes of problems in order to come up with actionable solutions to the problems.
With those practices above, you can be confident to have a good page speed. Yet, it is
understandable that you may struggle to implement them all by yourself, especially for
individuals who run their business on their own or small businesses without a specialized team.
You should think of hiring an expert or a developer for prompt support to save your time and
effort. It will definitely cost you something but it’s sure to be worth it.
If your website page speed is already fine and you want to make it better, a supporting app like
Swift is a good choice. But if your page speed is low to the point where it hurts your sales and
SEO rankings, you may want to contact OneExperts team to receive an optimization package
Now that you’ve gone through all the page speed best practices, let’s see inspiring case studies
from store owners like you who managed to boost their page speed and grow more sales.
Inspiring success
stories of
OneExperts clients
At OneExperts, we’ve been adopting all the best practices above and master them all.
Up to the present, we’ve helped 1,000+ Shopify stores speed up their websites.
With a faster and more high performant website, most of our clients experience
The Swift team has carefully examined their situations to come up with case-by-case
The 2 stories below are among many cases where OneExperts has become the savior of
these businesses. They have been struggling with the aftermath of poor page speed until
Background Challenge
Curated is a retailer with a physical The Curated team has made numerous efforts to speed up
location on the corner of Church their website as they knew how important it was. From font
street and West Summit avenue. It optimization, disabling pop-ups to using AMP, these tactics
offers a large selection of solutions still fell short of the brand’s expectation. In the end, they only
for home and office furniture, scored around 25 points on Google PageSpeed Insight.
lighting, and decorative accessories.
Solution Result
Successfully discovering the root of
the brand’s problem, the Swift
developer team used every possible Homepage score
method to speed it up. Since the increase by 60%
store owner wanted to keep all his
third-party apps, removing some of
them was not a suitable way. Collection page score
Therefore, the Swift team has increase by 47%
decided to eliminate all the apps'
unused codes to optimize the
Product page score
loading of these apps. Moreover,
increase by 56%
6448 images were adjusted to be
more responsive. Within just 2 days,
we were delighted to help the
Curated store resolve their issue that
they have been working on for years.
Toppen Prylar
Background Challenge
Toppen Prylar is a Shopify store Toppen Prylar's owner hired a freelancer to develop
offering a wide range of trendy the website. Without coding skills, the website has
and affordable products several difficulties with codes and images, resulting
through solid quality assurance in slow page speed and a low Google PageSpeed
process and 24/7 customer Insights score. This problem has affected the store's
support service.
Solution Result
Conclusion
Therefore, we hope that this ebook will be useful to you in understanding and learning
about page speed improvement. With 15 powerful practices, you can quickly apply and
follow to achieve high-speed performance.
Remember that this is a long journey with no definite beginning or end. You are not
required to use all of the suggested solutions right away. Instead, you should analyze
the results of your page via the online monitoring tools, then make any necessary
changes, and compare the performances between the two points in time.
The Swift team has carefully examined their situations to come up with case-by-case
solutions for each of them.
If you're looking for a tool to help you enhance the performance of your page, Swift and
its features are definitely worth a look. This all-round app can be your business’ savior
against the risks of a traffic spike or a rush of purchases.
Swift App
Maximize your Shopify site speed
Key featureR
M Boost your store speed by Preloading
content based on customer behavio=
M Load heavy content instantly by reducing up
to 70% of image sizeP
M Make Store Code Lighter by minifying
JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and Lazyload ImageP
M Make your site faster by rendering the most
important content to customers firsF
M Improve your page speed with free store
speed analysis & actionable suggestions
OneExperts
Shopify Page Speed Optimization Service
Key featurev
R Be aware of your current page speed & issues
with our comprehensive speed audiw
R Boost your page speed remarkably by fixing all
Google PageSpeed Insights warning\
R Optimize or remove the third-party app codes
that are slowing down your websitq
R Supercharge your page speed by preloading
content based on Google Analytic\
R Take the burden off your site by reducing all
your images, Youtube & Vimeo videos by +70c
R And unlimited other techniques to make your
website as lightweight as possible