“In commerce, milliseconds make a massive difference.” – Shopify
For clients that are on Shopify or considering a migration to Shopify, site speed should be a key strategy in improving performance. For over 14 years, even Google takes site speed into consideration for site rankings.
It is possible to build the fastest, best performing websites in eCommerce on Shopify, even for high-end enterprise brands. In our most recent launch of TOMS, each page was reduced to be no more than 2MB for fast load times and outstanding user experiences.
So how is this speed achieved on Shopify? Let’s dive in…
Shopify’s Platform
Shopify provides a great foundation, taking ownership over optimizing the hosting environment (CDN, caching, load balancing, security, etc.). The foundation frees up time for CQL and development teams, creating opportunity to focus on frontend performance.
Shopify is a metrics and performance driven platform. It’s well known that Shopify has the most performant checkout in the industry, but less known that they recently added Core Web Vitals (CWV) into the dashboard. This feature addition has brought more transparency to clients and as a result, has created a shift for clients to focus on site performance and optimize. CQL has always used CWV as a north star for performance to align site speed to SEO (i.e Google’s expectations). By aligning performance goals to Google’s Core Web Vitals, we’ve seen significant SEO benefits, and increases, for clients moving to Shopify.
Shopify Stats
Leveraging Core Web Vitals (CWV), Shopify recently completed an analysis with nearly 200,000 publicly available data points that prove that Shopify stores render up to 2.4x faster and 1.8x faster on average than stores on other platforms.
- Shopify’s site speed is 1.2 seconds on average, while competitors average 2.17 seconds.
- Shopify has the fastest server speed in commerce, up to 3.9x faster and on average 2.8x faster.
- 93% of businesses on Shopify have a fast store, more than any other major commerce platform.
Shopify Apps & Themes
It’s very easy to develop a site that is not performant; even when you have a great app ecosystem like Shopify’s. To maintain a high-performance site, it’s key to add apps with intentionality.
When defining site feature requirements with clients, CQL always balances the build vs. buy equation. Being performance-focused means considering not just the functionality you’re building, but also how it’s being built. The Shopify ecosystem is full of great apps to help extend the platform but it’s often not necessary to add an app. Most of the apps we leverage have no impact on the frontend, as they are pre-built integrations to handle syncing across systems. To remain performance focused, we will often build frontend features, instead of adding an app, which reduces the amount of third party scripts on page load and provides more control of performance.
In terms of theme selection to build the experience, CQL has a proprietary build framework, called Propel, that we leverage to meet the unique needs of our clients. For clients that have very advanced performance and content needs, we will recommend a headless hydrogen and oxygen implementation.
How CQL Focuses on Performance
Whether it’s a replatform to Shopify or we are optimizing an existing site on Shopify, here are some of CQL’s top tips on optimizing Shopify site performance:
- Image and media optimization through compression. This is an area that is key for clients to understand and maintain long term.
- Use`srcset` for responsive images, leveraging Shopify native CDN, and lazy loading. Shopify’s recent addition of section level loading parameters was a great addition to the Liquid API to fine tune frontend performance.
- Third party scripts, and asynchronous loading.
- Code Review and Code Refactoring.
- Code and performance audits for older codebases. This is a healthy exercise to take a holistic view of the site when a performance optimization has not been a focus in the past, or it’s a very dated codebase, or a codebase with many different authors.
Shopify’s New Whitepaper
Shopify’s new whitepaper “Commerce moves faster on Shopify,” featuring CQL and other industry experts, is a great resource to learn more about how Shopify powers the world’s fastest and best-converting eCommerce stores.
You can also get a personalized site speed audit for your online store, detailing how your site stacks up against industry benchmarks & competition.
Fast site speed impacts everything in your business – from online revenue to customer satisfaction. Contact us for more information on how CQL can help optimize your website on Shopify.
