How to Make Your Shopify Store Faster and Convert More Sales

Best Apps for Improving Shopify Page Speed on Mobile

There are a ton of great apps on the Shopify store that can be really helpful for improving your site speed if you are not a big tech savvy person.

Booster page Speed Optimizer:

Booster is literally just a single click away from imrpoving your shopify store page speed.

Booster is one of my go to and favorite Shopify speed optimization apps because its very simple to use, and is actually pretty effective. There are a few things to note about Booster before you install it though:

1. The app automatically speeds up your store’s load times by adding one simple file to your theme called booster-page-speed-optimizer.js
2. This app will not increase or decrease any pageload speed metrics such as Pingdom or Gmetrix since they do not account for second page load times in their results.
3. The app preloads links, which only works from the second page view.

As far as apge speed goes, this is a very simple way to improve the percieved page speed on mobile and desktop, but will do very little to improving the first time load speed. For improvements there, check out our second app recomendation.

The Amp App

One way to improve your Shopify App Store mobile speed very quickly is to implement a technology called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). AMP is not a technology made by Google to make it easier for websites to load on Mobile but it’s not natively supported by Shopify – which is really unfortunate.

On my personal website, metapv.co, I use AMP on all my blog posts and almost immediately saw an increase in traffic, SEO improvements and mobile page speed.

On Shopify, there are a ton of apps that allow you to make AMP focused designs on your Shopify store but my favorite is called The Amp App.

Pro’s of the AMP App:

1. Simple, no-code page speed optimization solution
2. Improves ‘Core Web Vitals’ score – Boosting SEO and Speed
3. Simple to Navigate Interface for designing your store

Cons of AMP app:

1. Only sets up AMP for product pages on free tier
2. Hard to verify from desktop

Best Tools for Analyzing & Testing your Shopify Store Speed

Knowing where to start to improve your Shopify page load speed is a good place to start. Luckily, there are great resources out there that can help you make real improvements to your websites speed.

Shopify Analyzer is a tool specifically for Shopify sites that shows you what can be optimized, gives recommendations on how to fix, and gives a meaningful score in each area. It covers aspects such as page speed, SEO, mobile usability, and more. It also offers a wide variety of integrations to help you improve your conversions, and sales data.

WEBPAGETEST is a tool for measuring load speed, page weight, and number of requests. It also provides suggestions on how to improve your site performance. If you are technically inclined, this tool can give you the exact code information to help you improve your page speed.

Crush Pics is one of my favorite “Set-it and Forget-It” Shopify tools for image compression. Its a Shopify app that automatically compresses your images to reduce their size and improve your site speed. It also allows you to convert your images to WebP format, which is faster and more efficient than JPEG or PNG.

How to improve Shopify store speed?

Website Speed comes down to essentially three things:

1. The technology of your server
2. Size of files
3. Optimization of assets you cannot reduce

On Shopify, we don’t really have the ability to make many server-side changes since a Shopify server’s technology is all controlled and managed by Shopify. However, we do have control of the files we have installed on our Shopify store and the optimization of our theme and the apps installed.

Common Mistakes People Make on their Shopify Stores that impact site speed.

Below are some best practices for optimizing the size of your files and the assets on your store that cannot be compressed or reduced:

• When you have the opportunity to upload a site file, make sure it is uploaded correctly!

What do I mean by this? For example, video files are a big no-no in speed optimization. Adding a video to your site and having it load as part of your website files during the live feed is insanely detrimental to your website’s speed.

So the best way to optimize a video file on your Shopify store if you really need to implement a video on your store is to upload it to youtube and embed the video if possible.

Another common mistake people often make on their Shopify store that can significantly reduce their store load times is not optimizing their theme’s built-in tools for mobile.

Many premium and free Shopify themes like Dawn come with built-in sections designed exclusively for mobile. For example, a Shopify theme might offer you the ability to have a A”mobile” image and recommend different presets. As I mentioned on my live stream addressing this very topic, mobile-friendly versions of your website are meant to help improve your mobile site speed and utilizing the best screen size for each mobile format can help you make big improvements to your mobile optimization.