What is the Shopify Speed Score and How to Improve it

Do you ever find yourself wondering why your Shopify store isn’t functioning as well as it should, despite having optimized your product pages, titles, and descriptions? With a killer SEO strategy and focused, relevant keywords used throughout your storefront – and eye-catching images to match – you should be soaring through the rankings, with traffic flooding in. Instead, you find yourself stuck once more, with your sales funnel stubbornly not budging.

If this is the case, you might have missed one key thing in your optimization process: Shopify page speed. This is a bit of an obscure thing to optimize, as you cannot directly edit it, rather, you must optimize other areas that affect the page speed, overall. Even so, some factors are not within your control, such as the speed of a customer’s network, their device, and their location. Even Shopify’s infrastructure can be a hindrance to the loading time of your online store.

Furthermore, if you want to continue to grow your business, but have a hard time updating your storefront, learn how to keep your Shopify store fresh!

In this guide, we’ll be walking you through what a Shopify speed score is, why it’s important to your business, and all the parts of your online storefront that you can adjust, in order to improve your speed score.

What is a Shopify Speed Score?

Your Shopify speed score measures how fast your storefront loads in the Shopify test environment, based on Google Lighthouse performance metrics. The score is reevaluated daily, to be updated as you make adjustments and improvements.

As one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world, garnering millions of customers per year, you must understand what a speed score is, and how you can improve it. A slow storefront will turn potential customers away, both losing out on revenue opportunities for your store, and simultaneously driving them straight into the hands of a competitor. 

Did you know website conversion rates severely drop off in the first 5 seconds of load time? Google recommends a 3-second load time, and anything beyond that, turns into an increased bounce rate by up to 32%. Search engines favor websites that have a healthy speed, as this improves the user experience.

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Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If you’re looking to buy a handbag online, and see something you like, you’ll want to put it in your cart and buy it right away. If the website you’re on is taking what seems like forever to load, you might find yourself growing frustrated. If images of the product are loading slowly, or not at all, or if your cart won’t update when you add that handbag in, these are all major deterrents to simply moving on to another website. 

With so many options in online retail, choices are endless, and customers can easily jump from website to website as they see fit and convenient. To them, they are not buying your handbag, they’re buying a handbag, and are not concerned where it comes from, so long as they get it without much fuss.

There are many things that are considered when your speed score is evaluated. The speed score is calculated on a weighted average of the Lighthouse performance scores for your store's home page, your product page with the most traffic over the last 7 days, and your collection page with the most traffic over the last 7 days.

When calculating the weight of these performance scores, Shopify considers the relative traffic of these pages against similar stores in that industry. They monitor this for 7 days, to ensure accuracy, as well. A good Shopify speed score is considered to be 50, and a speed score of 70 or more is excellent.

Why Your Shopify Speed Score is Important

So now that we’ve run through what the speed score is, and how it’s calculated, you might be starting to understand the reason it is so important, when it comes to meeting and exceeding your business objectives.

As we touched on earlier in this article, a poor speed score can be the defining factor between regular customers, and no traffic at all. The speed score is often overlooked when eCommerce business leaders optimize their storefronts, as it happens in the background. By having a fast-performing site, you’re opening yourself up to more customers, as the search engine favors sites with quick loading times, pushing them higher up the search rankings than that of their competitors.

Imagine you need to reach a target of 10 sales per day. Now say your conversion rate for a sale is 10%. That means that you need to reach 100 potential customers in one day. If you rank on the first page of Google, or the top 10 results, average page conversion is nearly 40%, whereas those on pages 3 and 4 are 18.7% and 10.2%, respectively. This is a huge gap – by getting from a rank of 30 to 10, you can increase your traffic by up to 4x! This in turn will bring more potential customers to your site that will convert. For more information on optimizing your Shopify store for the search engine, head over to our ultimate guide to Shopify Listing Optimization.

Overall, it’s SEO best practice to consider your page loading time, as it has a role to play in how search engines rank your content. And as we well know now, higher ranking content = more traffic = more sales.

How to Improve Shopify Speed Score

Now that we understand what a Shopify speed score is and why it’s important, let’s run through some of the ways that you can influence and improve your score. Here are 4 tips to help make your website run quickly.

Shopify Apps

As such a popular online marketplace, Shopify has countless integrations and third-party apps available to use. While each of these apps can provide a benefit to your store, they can also be a hindrance if they slow down your page loading time. Take a moment to evaluate which apps are relevant and useful – or in other words, worth the risk of negatively affecting your Shopify speed score – and keep only the apps that you need.

If you’re not sure how much of an effect your apps have on the page speed of your storefront, run a test where you check your speed score with the app, then uninstall and compare that with the updated score. If there is a big jump in performance, it might be worth considering that app’s removal.

Pro Tip: If you’re finding that your page speed is not affected when you uninstall an app, it might be an issue with excess code being left behind. This shouldn't be too big of a hindrance, as you can manually remove this code in the backend, should you ever need to.

Try to keep the customer experience top of mind when making these decisions. If you’re unsure whether to delete the app, think about your storefront journey from the customer’s perspective – are they more likely to stay because of the benefit of a pop-up window, despite the slow loading time, for instance? Or will the low speed be enough to deter them from your store, despite the benefit of the pop-up window?

Pro Tip: It’s worth doing an audit of the apps you do and don’t use, to remove any deadweight that’s dragging down your speed score

Themes, Fonts, and Code

There are a few things that you can adjust in your base theme and code which can lighten the load of your Shopify storefront and improve the speed.

Like any marketing-savvy eCommerce business owner, you’ve likely customized your Shopify storefront to match your unique brand, using custom fonts, colors, and imagery. This is great, as it is important to maintain a consistent image and brand across all sales channels, however, badly written or excessive code can be clogging up your theme and affecting page loading time. Do an audit of your code, either yourself or with a professional, and make efficiencies where it makes sense. You can also use base themes and edit from there, which are built for speed and efficiency. Try to check your theme regularly, and do updates whenever necessary, to ensure top-speed performance.

Speaking of branding, it might look nice to have custom fonts, but they do take up a lot of space and code in your theme. Consider using Shopify system fonts, which are designed not to have too much of a negative impact on your loading time. The general rule of thumb is the more you customize, the more room you take up through code, and therefore the slower your website will run.

Lastly, ensure that no coding errors are occurring, as the browser cannot load content that it can’t reach. This can cause serious page-loading delays.

Images and Sizes

Including eye-catching, high-quality images of products is important for any Shopify storefront, as it serves to both showcase product features, and attract potential customers. While you do need to upload multiple pictures to your product page, you must keep in mind how your images are sized. Higher-quality pictures tend to carry a heavier load, which affects the speed of your website.

The good news is you don’t need to choose between image resolution and page speed. There are methods you can use to adjust images without compromising the quality. We’ve listed below a few ways to do it:

• Compress: you can do this manually using Photoshop or other digital design software, or automatically with image compression tools.
• File type – using the wrong, or a less efficient file type is another reason your images might be clogging up your page loading time. Shopify recommends you use JPEG for your product images or PNG for decorative visuals.
• Responsive – ensure that your images are responsive, and load properly on both desktop and mobile.
• Testing – if you’re unsure how efficient your images are, try testing your speed score before and after adding images to your Shopify storefront.

Once you’ve optimized your images for speed performance, you’ll also boost your potential for conversions. If your customers are deciding whether to buy your product, and your images are slow to load, it could deter them from adding it to their cart. Bypass any blockers in the user journey, while improving your speed score, all in one go.

When it comes to taking the perfect picture, there is so much more to learn. Read all about improving and optimizing your product images for Shopify, and check out our ultimate guide to Shopify product photography.

Maintenance

Optimization is a bit like gardening – the work is never quite done. Once you’ve gone through our list as above, and optimized every factor to improve your page speed, you then need to maintain it to a high standard. As an eCommerce store owner, keeping on top of optimizations for your page speed can become a cumbersome task, and your time better spent elsewhere. Luckily, there are many tools and software available which automate optimization tasks for your Shopify store. Check out our article on the top 15 Shopify Optimization tools. These tools are a great way to free up time for you to focus on other things, however, it also helps to understand what role AI plays in creativity and innovation.

Aside from automated processes, it’s also best practice to regularly check your site speed and identify areas for optimization. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is a quick way to monitor how your speed is performing, on both desktop and mobile. It also offers recommendations for how to improve it. Simply plug your Shopify site URL into PageSpeed, and it calculates your score from a percentage of 1-100, with 11% and below being poor, and 81% and above considered good.

Quickly making just a few minor adjustments as suggested can vastly improve your Shopify speed score, without too much effort at all. So, it’s always worth checking to ensure that your site is always optimized. It’s also recommended to do a site audit once a quarter, especially if you have a large or seasonal inventory that changes often.

So, there you have it! All about Shopify’s page speed score, why it’s important, and four sure-fire ways to improve it. All it comes down to is understanding how your storefront is ranked on major search engines and having the tools and strategy to improve your position. Not only that, but having a high-performing website is key to ensuring you don’t lose out on any potential sales. 

The customer journey is everything, especially where eCommerce is concerned. It is so easy to click out of a site and jump to the next, so optimizing your Shopify store for page speed is a sure-fire way to help improve your ranking, your sales, and your overall customer satisfaction.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can I improve my store's speed on Shopify?

To improve your store's speed on Shopify, consider the following steps:

1. Optimize your images by compressing them and using the correct format.
2. Limit the number of apps installed as they can slow down your store.
3. Use a fast and responsive theme.
4. Minimize and optimize your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.
5. Enable lazy loading for images and videos.
6. Remove unnecessary custom code from your theme.
7. Utilize performance-boosting Shopify apps.

What factors affect my Shopify store's speed score?

Several factors impact your Shopify store's speed score, such as:

1. Unoptimized images and media files.
2. Uncompressed and unminified CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files.
3. Heavy or poorly coded apps and themes.
4. Server response time and location.
5. An excessive number of HTTP requests.
6. Inefficient use of browser caching and content delivery networks (CDNs).

Are there any tools available for testing my store's speed?

Yes, various tools are available for testing your store's speed, such as:

1. Shopify's Online Store Speed Report.
2. Google's PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse.
3. GTmetrix.
4. Pingdom Website Speed Test.
5. WebPageTest.org.

These tools provide insights and recommendations to improve your store's speed and performance.

How important is the speed score for my Shopify store?

The speed score is essential for your Shopify store's success. A faster-loading store offers better user experience, resulting in higher conversions, lower bounce rates, and improved customer satisfaction. Moreover, site speed is a significant factor in Google's search engine rankings, affecting the visibility and discoverability of your store.

Can using AMP help with my Shopify site's speed?

Yes, Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) can help improve your Shopify site's speed, especially on mobile devices. AMP is a Google-backed project designed to deliver faster web pages on mobile devices by simplifying the HTML structure and utilizing caching. By implementing AMP for your Shopify store, you can offer a faster mobile experience, potentially resulting in better search rankings and increased mobile conversions.

What is the role of theme optimization in improving Shopify load times?

Theme optimization plays a crucial role in improving Shopify load times. A well-optimized theme offers a faster and more efficient user experience, leading to higher conversion rates. To optimize your theme, consider the following:

1. Choose a fast, responsive, and mobile-friendly theme.
2. Minimize custom code or remove unnecessary features.
3. Optimize JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files by minifying and compressing them.
4. Use lazy loading for images and videos, reducing initial page load time.
5. Follow best practices for theme development and customization.