Speed is important when it comes to the experience of your customers online. The slower your website, the harder it is for you to earn sales on the site. While most websites across the internet have a speed of above 6 seconds, Google has said it is vital for brands to have websites that load faster than four seconds.

Research has also found that for every second it takes for your site to load, you could lose about 7% of your income. If your website loads in 6 seconds, that means you’re already losing 42% of your revenue.

There are numerous ways that you can improve your website’s speed. Here are some of the options.

Key Takeaways
1
Optimizing images, especially by converting PNGs to JPGs, significantly improves website loading speed.
2
Inactive apps should be disabled and uninstalled to enhance site performance.
3
A faster website loading time, under four seconds, significantly reduces the loss of potential revenue.

1. Optimize Images

The first and most important option is to optimize the images on your website. Images take up a lot of memory and the more images you have on a page, the longer it will take to load. Images should never be in PNG format on a website. This is printing quality images that are great for brochures or catalogs, but online they can really slow down your website.

Instead, you should be using JPG or JPEG. At the same time, you should optimize images, making them smaller so they take up less memory. There are image optimization apps out there (like SEO Doctor) that can help you with this.

2. Disable And Uninstall Inactive Apps

Have you got apps on your store that don’t do a lot for your website? These are taking up memory. While not in use on a page, an app will still be loaded in the background. Just one or two apps could slow down your website by a few tenths of a second.

Even free apps, while not costing you directly, could be costing you by lowering your page rank and conversions.

Therefore, ensure that you go through your entire app listing and try to find apps that aren’t in use. Some of those apps could probably be removed.

3. Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is when items that aren’t needed at a particular time aren’t loaded until they’re needed by the visitor. This is often used for images where images aren’t loaded into the browser until the visitor scrolls down to that part of the page. It can save lots of time for your website.

There are some apps that can do this for you, for instance Hyperspeed.

4. Speed Apps

There are also numerous speed apps. Some of them will do a couple of the jobs that we’ve mentioned above. However, it is another app added to your site, so some people might only see a marginal improvement to the site’s performance. One of the best apps for speed is Hyperspeed. It is rather expensive, but it covers a lot of potential areas where a Shopify store might be slow.