Complete Guide to Shopify Plus Page Speed Optimization

In a post-AI SEO world, your Shopify Plus store’s success, reach, and traffic strongly depends on its technical optimization.

There’s a lot that makes up a great website that search engines love, but one of the most important ranking factors is speed.

A sluggish page load time and delayed content display will make a potential customer lose interest.

Not to forget, Shopify Plus is designed for high-volume sales. Your customers expect a seamless, fast, and efficient shopping experience from a successful brand.

As a result, improving your load time is pivotal to success as it affects everything from customer satisfaction to revenue generation.

In today’s post, we’re going to deep dive into exactly this: what impacts your Shopify plus page speed and how you can optimize it.

Let’s go!

What is Shopify Plus page speed optimization?

Page speed optimization is the process of increasing the speed at which your store’s web pages are downloaded and displayed on the browser, mobile, desktop, iPad, etc.

To do this, you have to streamline and improve different elements of your side, both at your server end, like infrastructure and tech stack, and the experience for your customers.

Such technical improvements will reduce the load on the user’s browser, leading to quicker rendering and allow your potential customers to start browsing without delay.

Why is Shopify Plus page speed important?

According to one study, it was found that a staggering 79% of customers are less likely to make a repeat purchase if the web pages don’t load in time.

Even a one-second delay can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions. Ouch!

And what about a site that loads quickly? Take a look at the below advantages:

1. Enhanced User Experience: A fast-loading website makes for a smooth, enjoyable shopping experience. Otherwise, you will face higher bounce rates and lost sales opportunities.

2. Improved Search Engine Rankings: Search engines, particularly Google, bump up websites that load quickly. A faster Shopify Plus store is more likely to rank higher, increasing visibility and organic traffic.

3. Reduced Cart Abandonment: More painful than the bounce rate is a customer who took the time to browse, add to cart, and close the window because they got frustrated waiting. By improving your page speed, you also reduce your abandoned cart rate, leading to more sales.

4. Brand Perception: Shopify Plus brands are usually large enterprise companies. Your customers have higher expectations from you than small, home-grown businesses. Speed is an integral part of the experience they want while shopping from you.

Common factors impacting Shopify Plus page speed

When tackling a huge project like Page Speed Optimization, you need to first identify which of the below applies to your Shopify Plus store:

1. Large File Sizes: Heavy images, videos, and other media files will take longer to render.
2. Unoptimized Code: Bulky and unoptimized code, including JavaScript, CSS, and HTML.
3. Excessive HTTP Requests: Each element on a page, such as images, scripts, and CSS files, generates an HTTP request. Too many requests can overwhelm the server.
4. Lack of Browser Caching: When this isn’t active, the browser must reload all the elements of the web page every time they visit, causing delay.
5. Poor Hosting Solution: This can result in slow server response times and, consequently, slower page loads.
6. Content Delivery Network (CDN) Usage: Not using a CDN will slow down the speed at which content is delivered, especially to users located far from the server. Enterprise brands are often global and must account for all users to have a consistent shopping experience.
7. Excessive Use of Web Fonts: Web fonts instead of system fonts can add extra HTTP requests and can slow down your pages.
8. Conflicting or Multiple Plugins: Using too many plugins or apps, sometimes with similar features, can slow down your Shopify Plus store because each addition leads to more code and scripts that need to be loaded.
9. Redirects: Excessive or improper redirects can create additional HTTP requests and delay page loading.
10. Inefficient Liquid Code in Shopify: Liquid is a template language used by Shopify. Any errors here will increase your store’s rendering time.
11. Resource Load Order: The order in which resources are loaded (especially CSS and JavaScript) can affect how quickly the page becomes usable for the visitor.

By identifying and addressing these, you can significantly improve the speed of your Shopify Plus store. We’ll show you how you can do it in the next sections.

But before we improve something, we need to track and measure.

How to find your Shopify Plus stores’ page speed?

Thankfully, there are plenty of tools that can help you find out your load time quickly. Here are a few we recommend:

1. Shopify’s Online Store Speed Report: This report can be found on the Shopify Admin panel and gives you a speed score based on Google Lighthouse performance metrics. It also tells you how your store performs against similar Shopify stores and tracks any changes over time.
2. Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI): This is a free tool from Google that will score your web pages on both desktop and mobile browsers and give you tips to improve.
3. GTmetrix: Using GTmetrix, you can test your store’s speed in different countries, on multiple common browsers, and on fluctuating internet speeds.
4. Pingdom Website Speed Test: Pingdom has an easier interface to test the load time of your web pages and analyze any bottlenecks. You’ll find your store’s performance grade and insights into page size, load time, and requests, making it user-friendly for beginners.
5. Chrome DevTools: If you’re more technically inclined, Chrome DevTools can also be used to audit page speed directly.

How to optimize website Shopify Plus page speed?

Now that you know what causes slow loading times and how to measure your site’s performance, it’s time to work on improving it.

Here are Shopify plus page speed optimization tips that will shave off precious seconds from your page load time.

1. Choose the right theme

Often, the design team and the tech team are at odds- aesthetics or efficiency? There is a way to achieve both, and that means choosing an ‘ideal’ Shopify Plus store theme.

Ideal in the sense that it should have the following features:

• Responsiveness: Find a responsive theme that adapts seamlessly to different devices and screen sizes.
• Lightweight for Faster Loading: A theme bloated with excessive features that don’t apply to your business can slow down your site. Select themes with a clean, minimalistic design style and avoid ones with unnecessary animations and heavy graphics.
• Regular Updates and Quick Support: Such themes are more likely to keep up with changing web standards and performance factors. Make sure what you select has active support and development from their team to solve issues rapidly.
• Speed Test: Before finalizing a theme, remember to test its speed using the tools we mentioned above. Test your store for both mobile and desktop and under different conditions and traffic.
• Customization Flexibility: While customization can help in branding, over-customization can impact speed. As a result, it’s best to avoid themes that require too many plugins or apps to run.
• SEO Friendly: Themes that come pre-optimized for SEO can help improve your site’s visibility. For example, look for clean and structured code and ensure it supports all SEO best practices.
• Load Time with Rich Media: If your store relies heavily on high-quality images and videos, test how the theme renders them. Look for themes that offer built-in optimization for media files and check if they support lazy loading for images and videos.

2. Optimize images and videos before uploading

While it’s helpful to select a theme that can do this for you, it is better if you upload them in the right format to avoid unnecessary requests to servers. Remember to:

• Compress and Resize Images: Use image compression tools to reduce file size without compromising quality and resize images to the exact dimensions needed on your page.
• Choose the Right File Format: Use JPEG format for photographs due to its smaller file size. For logos and icons, PNG is great since it provides clarity in smaller sizes as well.
• Implement Lazy Loading: Lazy loading, or on-demand loading, only renders some elements of your web pages when the user needs it, for example, below-the-fold content. This reduces initial load time and saves bandwidth for users who don’t scroll down. Instead of auto-playing videos, use thumbnails with a play button.
• Host Videos Externally: Hosting videos on YouTube or Vimeo and embedding them on your site can reduce page load time and also optimize the video according to the user’s device and internet speed.
• Implement Responsive Images: Ensure your images can adapt to different screen sizes and devices.
• Avoid Uploading Excessive Media: Be selective and purposeful; too many media files can overwhelm your visitors and slow down your page.
• Utilize a CDN (Content Delivery Network): CDNs store your media files on multiple servers around the world, reducing load time.
• Monitor Image and Video Performance: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify images and videos that might be slowing down your site.

3. Use system fonts

System fonts, which are pre-installed fonts on a user’s device, help speed optimization in Shopify Plus stores. Here’s how:

• Faster Load Times: Unlike custom web fonts that take longer to download, system fonts are already available on most devices, leading to quicker page rendering.
• Perform Well Even with Slow Connections: For users with slower internet connections, system fonts ensure a fast and engaging experience for customers.
• Is Accessibility Friendly: System fonts are usually designed with accessibility in mind, making your store’s content easier to read.

4. Simplify homepage design

Not only does a cluttered and confusing homepage make for a frustrating user experience, it also reduces your page speed. If you find your homepage has a poor speed score, follow the below tips:

• Reduce Clutter: Limit the number of images, banners, and sliders per page and use whitespace to create a visually appealing layout that doesn’t overwhelm your customers.
• Optimize Hero Images: While large, attractive hero images can grab attention, they can also slow down your site. Remember to follow our image compression tips here.
• Prioritize Content: Decide what is crucial for your visitors to see immediately and display only that with lazy loading.
• Limit Widgets: Evaluate the necessity of each script and widget, like social media feeds. You can also embed them on other pages if they are not essential for the homepage.

5. Optimize collections and filters

The goal here is to improve product discoverability while minimizing load times. You can do this by:

• Creating Specific Collections: Group products into unique, smaller collections. This will speed up page load time as fewer products need to be loaded per collection.
• Optimizing Filter Functionality: Use a limited number of relevant filters and implement filter options properly in the code to minimize performance impact.
• Use Pagination: Instead of loading all products at once, pagination divides your catalog into different pages, significantly increasing page speed.
• AJAX for Filter Loading: AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) allows the page to update the product list dynamically after a user selects a filter without reloading the entire page.

6. Minimize redirects and broken links

Redirects, while sometimes necessary, can add extra load time to your pages, and broken links negatively impact user experience and SEO. Always:

• Audit and Optimize Redirects: Regularly check and improve the way your website sends visitors from one page to another. Don’t make a user jump from one link to another before they reach the right page.
• Fix Broken Links: Use tools to scan your site regularly for broken links and fix or remove them quickly or it will hurt your ranking on SERP.
• 301 Redirects for Permanent Changes: A 301 redirect for permanent URL changes is more SEO-friendly because it tells search engines that the page has been permanently moved.
• Plan URL Structure in Advance: This way, you minimize the need for future redirects. If you have to restructure, do it in a way that minimizes any impact on existing URLs.
• Track and Audit External Links: External sites may change, causing your links to become broken over time, so it’s important to be on top of this.
• 404 Error Page: Despite your best efforts, users may still find a 404 page. Here, make sure the page guides users back to important pages of your Shopify store. You can also get creative with your error message for branding brownie points!

7. Write efficient liquid code

Liquid, Shopify’s templating language, is responsible for how content is displayed in your Shopify Plus store. It’s important to write error-free code to increase page speed.

This section requires more technical chops so work with your teams to optimize your store’s code.

• Minimize Liquid Loops: Loops are a way to repeat a set of instructions or actions multiple times. For example, if you have a list of products on a Shopify store, you might use a loop to display each product on the page. The loop goes through the list and repeats the process of displaying a product until it has gone through the entire list. However, excessive looping in Liquid can slow down your site. Instead, optimize by keeping them short and avoid nesting them deeply.
• Use Efficient Conditional Logic: Overusing conditional logic (like ‘if-then’ statements) can lead to slow rendering because the server has to spend more time deciding what to do. Instead, avoid and remove redundant or unnecessary conditions.
• Limit Use of External APIs: Fetching data from external APIs can introduce delays so you need to minimize any reliance on external sources within your Liquid code. You can also cache API responses when possible to avoid repeated requests.
• Compress Liquid Code: Like any other code, Liquid can be compressed to reduce file size. Remove unnecessary whitespaces and comments from your Liquid files.

8. Implement AMP

AMP is a Google-backed project that produces lightweight versions of your store’s web pages by using minimal HTML and JavaScript. This reduces page speed because:

• AMP and SEO: Since it’s Google-made, it prioritizes mobile page speed, improving your store’s visibility and ranking in search results.
• Simplified Design: AMP page content gets stripped down to only what’s essential, ensuring fast loading times.

TurboBoost – The best Shopify Plus page speed optimization app

Congratulations on reaching this section of the blog post. It’s possible that you may be feeling overwhelmed after going through the previous section of to-dos.

But you don’t have to be.

To tackle this, we have built TurboBoost to address exactly this critical issue that most Shopify Plus stores face.

Here’s a preview of what you can expect from our team:

1. Automatic and Responsive Image Optimization: You can resize and compress images automatically, reducing page load times without compromising image quality. They will also adapt based on the device’s screen size.
2. Code Minification: By minifying HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, TurboBoost can reduce file sizes and the number of server requests, leading to faster page rendering.
3. Caching Mechanisms: With our sophisticated caching solutions, you can ensure that repeat customers enjoy quicker loading.
4. Lazy Loading of JavaScript: With TurboBoost, essential elements of your web page are loaded first.
5. User-Friendly Interface: We’re beginner-friendly! Our simple, intuitive dashboard makes page speed optimization possible for those who aren’t technically savvy.
6. Real-Time Analytics: Access insights into your store’s performance live to quickly fix any errors that impact your page speed.
7. Integration with Shopify Plus: We offer seamless integration with Shopify Plus, ensuring compatibility and ease of use for large enterprise brands.

Conclusion

You made it!

In this detailed guide, we have explored various strategies to improve your Shopify Plus store’s page loading time.

We also explored how you can use Turbobooster to ensure your store renders quickly without having to individually address each issue with a different tool!

Get started with TurboBoost today.