Improving Shopify Site Speed Can Increase Conversions- A Case Study
Table of Contents
- What is web performance?
- Why is Shopify Page Speed Optimization important?
- How to measure your store’s site speed and other metrics.
- How to make your Shopify Site faster and increase conversions.
- Is web performance optimization worth the investment?
- Conclusion
Page speed is a factor in Google ranking, but its impact is not limited to your organic visibility. For e-commerce sites, speed is always an issue, because low page load times can improve the user experience, which in turn increases the conversion rate.
The longer you delay optimizing your website to increase speed, the more customers you will lose to the faster competitor’s website. Google’s mobile page speed research shows that the bounce rate of a website gets worse every second it loads.
- 79% of customers who are “unsatisfied” with website performance are unlikely to buy again
- 64% of smartphone users expect to load a website in 4 seconds or less
- 47% of online shoppers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less
What is Web Performance?
Web performance is how fast your website loads in the browser and how responsive it is to user interactions. Site speed, page speed, and web performance are often used interchangeably, but there are differences. In short, website speed covers all pages in your domain, page speed focuses on a single URL, and web performance focuses on speed in addition to other metrics.
Why is Shopify page speed optimization important?
Here are the reasons why Shopify Page speed Optimization is Important:
User Experience
The faster any website obtains information and content, the higher the user engagement it attracts. This will increase your conversion rate proportionally and generate more revenue. The Shopify page optimization service is designed to provide a high-quality user experience.
Search Engine Optimization
Optimization can help you exclude unnecessary data from your Shopify store, thereby providing room for fast loading sites. Shopify page optimization can help you easily get high Google rankings.
Revenue
Even with a 1 second delay, the conversion rate will be reduced by 7% and page views will be reduced by 11%. Imagine if you optimize the page. The change in loading speed optimization in just 2 seconds resulted in a 3% increase in revenue.
Conversion Rate
When providing a good user experience, it is very likely to get a huge conversion rate.
Fast page loading usually means lower bounce rate, higher customer engagement, and faster shopping cart checkout speed, thereby increasing user conversion rates.
Traffic
With a good user experience + conversion rate + page optimization, you will get a lot of traffic. These factors are the most critical point, which can bring more page views per visit and a natural increase in organic traffic to your store.
More Customers
A good-looking website + faster loading speed + more traffic + more engagement is the perfect formula to attract more users.
How to Measure your Store’s Site Speed and other Metrics
1. Performance Threshold
The good range of Core Web Vitals is 2.5 seconds for LCP, 100 milliseconds for FID, and 0.1 for CLS. For many visitors, everything starts to become dull and will have a negative impact on their website experience. In other words, you should strive for the highest possible score, because every millisecond is important in increasing the conversion rate and user engagement of your online store.
2. PageSpeed Insights (PSI) & Lighthouse
You can analyze individual URLs in Google PageSpeed Insights. If the URL has enough real visitors, you can see “field data”, but if there are not enough samples, you can only see “lab data”, which is based on 75% of slower connections and devices. The “Source Summary” displays real user data for the entire domain. The report will also detail recommendations for improving each indicator.
3. Measurement Best Practices
You can get a very high-speed score, while the impact on the real user experience is small. Similarly, you can greatly improve the customer experience and KPIs with proper optimization, but the speed score is still relatively low-just like our example screenshot. The latter is more important.
How to make your Shopify Site faster and increase conversions:
When it comes to network performance, your potential customers need two things:
- View content faster
- Use your website faster
If your optimization helps any of them, your visitors are more likely to make a purchase. Doing this well is an art and a science.
Common Suggestions you Should Avoid
We often hear wrong tips from various communities on how to improve Shopify network performance:
- Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Remove third parties
- Lazy load everything
- Switch Themes
Use Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Shopify Speed Technology already provides CDN, asset reduction, and image compression by default, so spending your time here is a waste of energy.
Remove Third Parties
Removing third parties is not always an option, as most eCommerce sites rely on them to provide various functions. If you don’t need it or you get little benefit, delete it. Otherwise, postponing, switching to an alternative solution, or writing your own solution are better suggestions (in this order).
Lazy Load Everything
Lazy loading of images sometimes hurts your performance. Delaying above-the-fold content can help, but delaying above-the-fold content can result in a poor user experience. Check out other magento 2 development sites by PROS
Switching Themes
Switching themes is equivalent to pressing the randomizer button and crossing your fingers. Some are better than others, but if you want to maximize performance, all of them require custom optimization.
Is Web performance optimization worth the investment?
Optimizing your code allows you to turn more visitors into satisfied customers. Your degree of influence depends on: sales volume, current performance indicators, traffic sources, ideal customer equipment types, marketing efforts, business resources, etc.
Conclusion
It takes time to improve website speed and performance. It is important to get the support of the team to invest time and resources to optimize site performance and speed. The data and tools we have shared can help you build a case.
