According to a recent study conducted by a digital marketing agency, ecommerce websites that load in a second or less had conversion rates that were three times higher than sites that took more than a second to load. Yet another study found that 82% of respondents claimed slow page speeds affected their buying decisions, with 45% of people surveyed saying slow load times made them less likely to actually purchase items from an online store.
It’s obvious from these studies that slow load times aren’t just annoying to online shoppers; they can have a huge effect on a business’s bottom line. Consequently, it’s incredibly important for members of the ecommerce industry to make sure their stores load as quickly as possible, but it can often be difficult to know just where to start when it comes to speed optimization.
Fortunately, for business owners who use Shopify to operate their online stores, there are lots of speed optimization apps available. These apps can not only access a site’s speed but also make the necessary changes to get it to load faster. We’ve chosen a few of our favorites to share with you, and if you’re not already one of the many people using Shopify, this incredibly popular and feature-rich application is currently offering a free trial.
Hyperspeed: Extreme Page Speed
This Shopify plugin is designed to help you speed up your online store’s load times on both desktop and mobile devices using image compression, lazy loading, minification, JavaScript deferral, and critical CSS. Plus, Hyperspeed will evaluate your ecommerce website to let you know what’s slowing down your online store, such as a specific app, and it will continually monitor your site and alert you when new images or apps start to affect its speed. Also, this Shopify app allows you to decide how aggressive or conservative you want to be about your store’s speed optimization, and it will even show you the impact your choice will have on elements of your site, such as image quality.
AmpifyMe
If you want to make sure your online store loads quickly on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones, then you have to see AmpifyMe. This Shopify app makes it super simple for you to transform your ecommerce website’s existing web pages into accelerated mobile pages using AMP, a web component framework from Google. By using AmpifyMe, your online store’s web pages should load pretty much instantly on mobile devices, which can improve not only customer satisfaction but also your website’s SEO.
Booster: Page Speed Optimizer
With Booster, you can improve your e-commerce website’s load times in under a minute and with just a few clicks, and it’s compatible with OS 2.0. When a customer hovers over a link on your online store, this Shopify app will begin pre-loading that page, so if the person clicks the link, the web page will load seemingly instantaneously. Booster can help your site load as much as three times faster, and it’s incredibly easy to install, making it a great choice for busy online retailers.
AiSpeed | Speed Optimization
This Shopify app uses artificial intelligence, or AI, to work out which elements of your ecommerce website it needs to load when someone browses your store and which ones can wait. AiSpeed also reviews your site to figure out which apps are impacting your store’s performance, and it uses image optimization to reduce the sizes of these files without sacrificing their quality. Plus, this Shopify app shrinks file sizes with the help of JavaScript minification and boosts load times by using lazy loading.
Superspeed Google’s Page Speed
This Shopify plugin is perfect for people who are serious not just about optimizing their websites but who are also interested in monitoring their online stores long-term in order to keep load times fast for the foreseeable future. Superspeed will assess your website and recommend ways to make it faster, and it will also constantly monitor your online store and run page speed audits every day to provide you with a daily median performance score for every page of your site.