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Six steps to drastically improve website performance

Slow website could have detrimental effect on the success of your e-commerce business. Some of the most common results form slow ecommerce websites are page abandonment as well as drop in conversion rate and impact on the Search engine ranking which would directly result in decreased trust in your website.

That is why we have aggregated six relative easy steps that will improve your website performance.

  1. Combine and concatenate CSS and Javascript files By combining and concatenating CSS and Javascript files we achieve two main things:

reduce the number of HTTP requests reduce the size of the HTTP requests (lower bandwidth)

The performance benefits can be quite substantial to the user with fewer files and smaller files to download.

  1. Use a Content delivery network A Content delivery network (CDN) is a series of servers located throughout the world that can be used to store and serve your static website assets such as stylesheets, javascript, images, PDFs etc. The benefit of a CDN is its ability to reduce the load on your web server, which without a CDN would be required to serve the file types mentioned above. On high traffic websites, any means to reduce the load on the web server is incredibly beneficial. CDNs can speed up your website as well as increase the amount of traffic that your website can handle without falling over.

  2. Utilise page caching

Page caching is available in many CMS systems including Shopify. It is best suited to websites that display the same content to all users. Think of a news website, blog, government sites etc. Page caching improves performance as it essentially takes a snapshot of a webpage and displays this snapshot to users. The speed improvement is achieved by not needing to connect to a database and to render a page dynamically every time a user visits the page.

  1. Optimise content

We all know the paradigm that content is king but we also know that long pages that are loading slow would disconnect the client from your ecommerce experience and your storytelling. That is why we are suggesting to create more compact and focused pages.

  1. Integrate AMP

Accelerated Mobile Pages — or AMP is an open standard framework designed for any publisher to create fast-loading web pages on mobile devices. More than 60% of shoppers buy from mobile devices, so it is important to make sure your website is mobile-ready and load quickly. For this reason, with AMP (Mobile Accelerated Pages) technology users can access your website quickly on mobile devices. In Shopify, you can easily generate AMP pages for your site quickly and efficiently with FireAMP or RocketAmp Apps. Both these Apps have an over four-star rating on the Shopify App Store and improve your page loading time on mobile. Otherwise, you could consider creating the Shopify API to develop these AMP pages.

  1. Google Tag Manager

Typically, you add separate tracking codes for Google Analytics, AdWords conversions, goals, and remarketing tags, etc., on your own end or you send it to the developer. Тhis process will take time and eventually slow down the overall site performance. With the help of Google Tag Manager all, your tags are stored in one place. You can use Google Tag Manager with your Shopify store.