Online Store/Website Speed Improvement | Hong Kong Online Store Design Expert

The impact of website loading speed

As we all know, the increase in online store loading speed can not only improve customer shopping experience and increase store exposure, but also increase conversion rate. But you know what? It turns out that the speed of website loading also affects your ranking on the Google search page!

Google attaches great importance to user experience, so naturally, website speed has become a very important item in website optimization, which has a great impact on SEO ranking and website experience. In addition, Google has a so-called crawl budget. If your website is too slow, it will affect the health of crawlers to crawl your web pages. If the speed is too slow that crawlers can’t crawl your web pages, the overall SEO performance will be very, very poor.

Let’s talk about how the speed of the Shopify online store can be evaluated and improved.

Factors affecting the loading speed of online stores

The following factors will affect the speed of online stores:

• Apps
• Third-party gallery and services
• Analysis database
• Scenery theme code
• Number and size of pictures and videos

Improving your online store can improve ratings and rankings. Even if you haven't made any changes to the store, if other similar stores are improved, your ranking will be lowered. For example, if several similar stores optimize their pictures and remove unused apps, the number of stores that are faster than your store may increase, thus lowering your ranking.

Why can Shopify provide such a fast loading speed?

Shopify hosts your online store on a fast global server, and does not limit the store bandwidth. In addition, CDN stands for content delivery network. Shopify provides merchants with a world-class CDN operated by Fastly to ensure that your online store can be loaded quickly around the world. In addition to the local browser cache, Shopify also caches pages on the server side. Since customers will receive a cached copy in the future, although the page may be slower when it loads for the first time, it will load faster in the future.

How to optimize website loading speed

When optimizing website loading speed, we must not use our own computer to evaluate how fast the website is, because your customer may be located in a place with a poor Internet environment or his mobile phone is connected Connect to a low-speed wifi network, such as using a mobile phone in an extremely crowded place when commuting to and from get off work. At this time, we need to help with a third-party speed measurement tool, such as GT Metrix.

Link: https://gtmetrix.com/

Here are the speed test results of our Wilkinson Tech Solutions official website. Then at the bottom left of the screen (the section in the figure shown below), you can see what components are taking the most time to load when the web page loads.

For most website owners, after improving the size of the images, the loading speed of the website can already be improved.

If you have installed apps to change the function or appearance of the website, these applications will add code to the theme to ensure normal execution, and the number of programs will affect the loading speed of the website. The more the code, the longer it takes to load. Therefore, you can remove unused  code to improve the loading speed of the online store. If you no longer use some of those applications, you can remove the app alongside with the code.

Conclusion

Google has many conditions for judging website rankings. Even if we optimized Google Page Speed, we must remember that website speed is only one part of the algorithm. Don’t expect that once the website speed is optimized, the ranking will rise to the first place. Many items, such as website content, keywords, backlinks, etc., are related to rankings. Improving website speed is only one of them.