3 Easy Steps to Fix a Slow Shopify Store + Bonus Tips

Is your Shopify Speed Score bad? Before you reach out to developers and have them “tweak” code on your site you should know that most of the time a slow Shopify Store Speed Score is something that you can resolve easily, without any additional development. Development may actually do more harm than good at this stage for you.

Below are the 3 Golden Rules to follow when trying to improve your Shopify Store’s Speed Score.

Step 1. Identify what’s slowing down your Shopify Store

Run a speed test on Google Page Speed Insights and/or GTMetrix and find out what are the critical components slowing down your Shopify Store.

You will see the following recommendations:

• Optimize images
• Minify CSS
• Minify JavaScript
• Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content
• Leverage browser caching and Reduce server response time
• Avoid landing page redirects
• Gzip compression

Step 2. Optimize images

Run your website banners through an image optimization service like https://tinyjpg.com/ or use an app like Shopify Image Optimizer.

Stop using banner sliders on your homepage. Only 5-10% of all website traffic ever gets to see a website’s homepage and even less will scroll through or wait to see the sliders on the homepage. Use a hero layout instead (banner + featured collections + banner + featured products + banner + testimonials, etc).

Stop using category header banners just for the sake of it as they add weight to the page and push products down thus decreasing your conversion way.

Step 3. Review your Shopify Apps

Go through ALL your Shopify Apps and uninstall everything you are not using.
Every app you install adds code to your site which will ultimately slow your Shopify Store. Even if it seems to you that your store is not slow, the added code will show up in speed test grades which will make search engines believe the website is slow. Remove anything you are not using and reconsider older apps that have not shown any results.

Note: Even when uninstalling some apps, they still leave some code behind. That is why when you add new apps you should always make a copy of your theme and if you chose not to use that app revert to the previous copy of the theme.

3 BONUS TIPS for a Healthy, Fast, Responsive Shopify Store

  Bonus Tip 1

Completely disable any theme functionality you are not using. Often times you will see bloatware in the theme that you are not really using (popups, comparisons, language dropdowns, currency selectors, etc). Go through all your theme’s settings and completely disable everything you are not using. This will get you a cleaner theme, cleaner code, and better speed scores.

  Bonus Tip 2

If your theme is old you should REALLY consider moving into a fast, clean, and responsive and new theme. This has been a great success for so many of our clients. It will be less expensive than fixing up something that is old and dated.

  Bonus Tip 3

Try to AVOID doing custom development on your Shopify website. From hundreds of use cases, we found only very few that actually required custom development. Most of the times a theme that is picked correctly, together with the right apps will resolve all and any issues you could have.

Tried these 3 steps and your Shopify Store Speed Score is still not improving.
Most likely your theme is not properly optimized or maintained by its developers. If it’s a Shopify or a 3rd party theme reach out to Support and ask for help but if it’s an old theme you’re better off moving to a newer, cleaner theme – think of it as a fresh start.