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Shopify is inarguably one of the biggest and best ecommerce sites out in the web, it's also arguably the best. The platform has enabled many to make money online by selling products and continues to grow with many new users even though some believe that the dropshipping bubble has popped.
So you're trying to sell, you've already set up your website with Shopify but at times the site maybe slower and this is a bad thing.
It is devastating for your business as slower websites give off the wrong impression to potential buyers, that your website isn't bona fide, that they probably won't get quality products from you. And you obviously don't want that. You want to fix it as soon as possible but how do you do that and why does it get slower in the first place? Well here are the answers.
Believe it or not, your website is probably slower than you think. You might believe that your beautiful, newly created web design with all of its unique features makes your site fast, but that’s just how it appears to users.
But if you look closer, you’ll see there are lots of hidden issues that contribute to slow loading times.
Each time you load a page into your browser, your computer has to do several tasks. It checks for any updates to your browsing software, it loads font files, it starts running scripts for layout styles, then finally it displays the page onto the screen for you to view.
If you make many pages on your site, each page has to repeat these same steps for every single thing displayed on the page.
So why does everything take so long? Well, let’s run through everything that needs to happen when you click on a link in an email, scroll down a webpage, or open a facebook message.
You’ve got four choices here: use image content, use video content, include audio content, or create a special form using html and css. If you don’t know what you’re doing, uploading and preparing graphics can be extremely difficult and cause them to fail.
So too many of any form of content, just might be the reason your website is running slow.
Images are one of the most important components to a website’s performance. When people visit your site, you want them to quickly understand what they’re looking at and how it relates to what they’re doing.
Too many images can prevent someone from leaving a comment or buying something, so your goal should be to use images only when they help get the message across.
That said, there are ways to add images while still keeping your site speed efficient. Reducing the number of images you use is also helpful since more pictures mean bigger files.
Here are some strategies for reducing the amount of image-based content on your site.
Many products have samples of colors; these are often represented by the product color palette, which uses different shades to indicate the available colors. By using predefined colors, you avoid loading new images with high bandwidth and large file sizes.
You may also display stock photos that represent the products you sell. To save time, download these from a public source such as Wikimedia Commons. Then paste the photo into your store, either inside the single page or under the corresponding product gallery.
Finally, ensure that all comments placed on your site are brief, informative and not promotional. Someone who searches for information will also look to purchase something.
Another common cause of website speed issues is ad blocks. Many bloggers set up custom ad spots in their blogs. These are usually placed between paragraphs or sections, called hotspots.
When you run a blog site with several articles, there may be multiple instances of ad boxes across your sites, including footers, at the bottom, right, left and/or top of an article.
Each time you run a blog post that has one or more advertisements, it can take away from the overall loading speed of your website.
If you have installed Google Adsense, Yahoo Affiliates for example, then go to settings-->adsense. There you can customize your ads. Then click “load new ads” because some things about your advertising already need to be updated.
Google announced that their webs design was optimized for speed. This means your site should load more quickly than others.
If you sell products, they may even give your page a rating after testing various versions of your website. These tests were done to see which pages were faster and which weren’t. Based on these test results, along with other metrics (such as pageration time), they then gave each page a score.
A higher number indicates better performance. If your score is below five, there are several things you can do to make it quicker and aside from the ones we've already told you about, you can check out the video above.
