Is Your Shopify Store Slow?

One of the first things you'll notice when setting up a new website is that, after a while, it starts to run a little slower than it did when you first set it up. This can be due to numerous reasons, but ther are 3 things we've found that most store owners overlook that can have a significant impact on your page speed.

How Can You Measure Your Page Speed?

Measuring your page speed is easy. There are numerous tools out there to accomplish the task, but we recommend using Google's Page Speed Insights tool. Simply type your URL into the box and it will analyze your website giving you helpful tips to speed things up. Since this tool isn't built for Shopify, a lot of the advice it gives you will be hard to implement. This is why we've picked the 3 top things you can do to speed up your Shopify store today.

Optimize Your Image Sizes

When you upload images to your theme or products, Shopify won't automatically optimize them. This means they can end up being rather large files. When you have several of these on a single pages, it can slow your page load times by quite a bit - especially for mobile users on a cell connection.

Ensuring your images have a small file size will make it quicker for people to download your content, and free up connections for other valuable resources like javascript and css. Aim for images as small as you can get them without losing too much quality. A good file size to shoot for is less than 200kb on average.

Uninstall Useless Apps

Do you actually use all of those apps you have installed? If not, delete them - right now.  Many apps on Shopify (Glow included) use a feature called "Script Tags" to install themselves on your website. This essentially means that, during installation, the app sends Shopify a URL of a javascript file that it should load on every page of your site.

For apps you use, this can be great. They can inject their added (and valuable) functionality into your website with little to no effort on your part. For apps you don't use, this can become a problem. These apps, if left installed, will continue to load their scripts on your site even if they aren't actually doing in anything. This eats up avilable requests and bandwidth causing other content to be delayed. If you have any apps you aren't using still installed, it's time to show them the door.

Disable "Quick View" in Your Theme

This doesn't apply to every Shopify store, but is more related to which theme you elect to use. Certain themes have a feature called "Quick View" or "Quick Preview" that lets you click or hover over a product and see some basic info from the main product grid instead of visiting that product page.

This can be a really nice feature for your customers since they don't have to go into every product page to see available sizes, images, description, etc. The downside of this feature is that all of those product images end up getting loaded in the background and you can't see them. If you have a lot of products, this can become very resource intensive on not only the connection, but it can actually crash the customer's browser! If you want a really quick fix to speed up your site, go through your theme settings and everywhere you see something called "Quick View", disable it.