If you’re running an eCommerce business, you probably know the importance of ensuring your website performs as efficiently as possible. To achieve this, you will want to optimise your Shopify theme for maximum performance.
Doing so can reduce loading times, improve search engine rankings, and give your visitors a better user experience to increase your conversions and sales. You can hire our Shopify expert agency to handle this for you, so you can focus on other essential aspects of your business.
If you’d like to optimise your Shopify theme yourself, we’ll share our top 6 tips on how to do that in this article.
Tip 1: Minimise Theme Customisations
When you've selected which Shopify theme you want to customise, it's time to further tailor it to your store's content, style, and brand. It’s a great idea to create a website that’s fully customised and built for your brand, but remember, this usually means adding custom code and scripts.
As you customise your Shopify theme, a minimalist approach is recommended. This means using as few unnecessary plugins, scripts, and custom code as possible. The more of these you use, the more you can slow down your site's performance.
For this reason, follow the “less is more” principle when it comes to theme customisation. This will ensure your website is stable and secure, so your eCommerce can perform at its best.
Tip 2: Optimise Images
Using large image files can slow your website. This can have a negative impact on your store’s overall performance in terms of SEO and loading times and not to mention customer satisfaction.
Compress images without compromising quality
An easy and quick way to avoid large image files causing long loading times is to compress the images in your store. By compressing images used in product photos, headers and so on, you can reduce the images' file size without compromising visual quality.
There are several tools for this, such as TinyIMG or SEO Image Optimizer Wizard.
Leverage lazy loading to avoid loading times
Another way to optimise images is leveraging lazy loading techniques. This means you implement a function that loads the images when needed. This means that the images become visible to the visitor, when necessary, for instance, when scrolling down. By loading images with lazy loading, you can also reduce the amount of data that would otherwise be required if all images were to be loaded simultaneously.
Through these two simple measures, you can effectively improve your store’s performance and enable your customers to browse through products without the frustration of slow loading times.
Tip 3: Minify and Concatenate CSS and JavaScript
Another way to effectively reduce loading time is by minimising the number of HTTP requests made to the server. This can be done by minimising the file sizes of CSS and JavaScript files.
CSS and JavaScript files are part of the code of your website. Both are used to create the visual and interactive elements of the web page. CSS and JavaScript are loaded by the browser every time a user visits your website, and by minimising these files, you can significantly reduce loading times.
You can do this through various tools, such as using a minification and concatenation tool or app. These types of tools automatically optimise CSS and JavaScript files and combine them into a single file instead of two.
Tip 4: Utilise Caching
By utilising caching, you can decrease the workload on your server and improve the speed at which visitors load your store. Caching involves storing static resources such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript files, and images in temporary storage locations.
Shopify automatically caches various files such as product images, CSS, and JavaScript files, but you can utilise caching in more ways. One of these is by enabling browser caching. You do this by configuring your store to instruct the visitor’s browser to cache specific resources locally.
Another way of doing this is by implementing a caching app. These types of apps offer advanced caching and customisation options. However, a website's caching needs can vary, and Shopify already handles several aspects of caching, so in many cases, further configuration is unnecessary.
Tip 5: Optimise Code Structure and Markup
Optimising the code structure and markup in Shopify means making the website’s code and structure more efficient and organised.
This can be done in several different ways. For example, you can optimise CSS and JavaScript as described above. Another approach is using Shopify’s theme sections and blocks to modulate your coding.
In addition, you can ensure that your HTML markup follows semantic conventions and uses appropriate tags for different types of content. This can also help search engines to better understand your content and give your website a better SEO ranking.
The key benefit of optimising code structure and markup is that it improves website performance by reducing file sizes and minimising HTTP requests. This ensures loading times are as efficient as possible, which creates a better experience for your store visitors.
Tip 6: Test and Monitor Performance
To consistently ensure that your website is properly optimised for maximum performance, it’s important to conduct regular tests. You can do this with performance testing tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or WebPagetest.
Regularly testing your website with these kinds of tools allows you to measure performance during various conditions. For instance, variation in user loads and traffic patterns. You can identify performance bottlenecks by monitoring your website’s key performance metrics, such as response time, page load speed, and server resource utilisation.
Key takeaway: Optimise your theme for ultimate customer satisfaction
Give your customers the best online shopping experience by ensuring your theme is optimised for the best performance. By continuously testing and taking the necessary measures for a better user experience, you can reduce load times and improve your store’s SEO.
In the fast-paced and competitive landscape of eCommerce, website performance plays a key role in attracting visitors and retaining customers.
If you’re not experienced in coding, website audits, and SEO, you may want to consider working together with a digital marketing agency to make sure that your Shopify theme is fully optimised. This way, you can let a dedicated professional optimise your online store, so you can focus on other essential aspects of your business.
Find out what your eCommerce website needs for an optimal customer performance by booking a call with our experts, who can give you the right advice and support.
