Have you ever heard a fact: pages that take only one or two seconds to load have an average bounce rate of 9%, but pages that take five seconds to load have an average bounce rate of 38%.
If you want to minimize your average bounce rate and enhance your site performance, it’s very important to enhance the Shopify speed optimization. The performance of your site’s speed plays a big role in how effectively you can turn visitors into customers. Basically, the quicker your site loads, the better your chances of converting users. Plus, if you’re aiming to boost your Shopify store’s SEO, keep in mind that performance is a minor factor in Google’s ranking system.
Whether you’re dealing with paid ads, email campaigns, managing your online reputation, or social media marketing, the speed of your website plays a big role for users coming from these various sources.
What is Shopify speed optimization?
Website speed optimization is all about making your site load faster, and finally promoting your Shopify store. Sometimes called website performance optimization, the main aim is to ensure your e-commerce store opens up quickly—so you don’t lose potential customers who might get annoyed and leave before they even see what you have to offer.
There are two key metrics used to measure speed:
- First Contentful Paint, which Google explains measures the time it takes your browser to render the first piece of DOM content after a user navigates to your page.
- Time to First Byte, which measures the time it takes for the server hosting a website to respond to a user’s browser.
What Site Speed Optimizations Does Shopify Already Have?
One of the nice parts about Shopify is that Shopify is designed to be fast right from the start. It has some built-in tricks to make your store load quickly, which is great because nobody likes waiting for a website to appear! Here’s how it works:
- Caching: Imagine your store as a library. Shopify “caches” frequently used books (like images, website designs, and special effects) in a special area. So, when someone visits your store again, they can quickly grab those books from the special area instead of searching the whole library, making things much faster.
- Global Delivery Network (CDN): Think of it like having copies of your store’s books in libraries all over the world. This means no matter where your customer is, they can quickly get the information they need, just like borrowing a book from the closest library.
How To Optimize Shopify Site Speed
Here are 8 steps to speed up a Shopify site:
1. Choose A Lightweight Shopify Theme (Original Data)
Choosing a fast Shopify theme can immediately put your website in a great position from a performance standpoint. Some themes might come with unnecessary, putting your site at a performance disadvantage. Conversely, a more lightweight theme will set your site up for strong performance moving forward.
2. Reduce Large Image Sizes
Resizing large image sizes can really help boost the speed of a Shopify site. We’ve checked out a bunch of Shopify stores and noticed that many businesses tend to use a ton of images. It totally makes sense since images are essential for eCommerce. This is especially true in areas like retail, where showcasing products with images is a must.
While images do wonders for enhancing the user experience and branding of your store, they can slow things down. Image files are usually way bigger than regular HTML or CSS files. So, if you load up your page with too many images, it can be pretty heavy, take longer for users to load compared to a page with fewer images.
Sometimes, you can upload an image at sizes much larger than the render size, this causes unnecessary performance issues. This means that users must download a larger image than is actually required for it to render.
3. Compress Image
Images can also be unoptimized when they are not compressed. It’s pretty typical to find Shopify stores where the uploaded images haven’t been compressed, resulting in unnecessarily large file sizes.
When you use compression, you can significantly reduce the file sizes of your image assets compared to the original. This smaller size helps browsers load your website content more quickly. When it comes to image compression, we prefer using a combination of these two methods:
- Shopify Apps: Some apps will automatically compress images with one click. We’ve had good experiences with SearchPie SEO & Speed optimize.
- Optimizilla: This allows you to manually compress large image assets before uploading to your site.
4. Lazy Load Images
The speed of loading images has a significant impact on page load speed for all devices such as mobile or desktop computers. In terms of speed, a Shopify merchant needs to pay attention to 2 types: shopify speed optimization for site and shopify speed optimization for mobile. You can optimize the loading speed of images with some Shopify tools like SearchPie, Crush: Speed & Image Optimizer, Tapita: SEO Optimizer & Speed.
Best Shopify speed optimization services in 2025
There are some steps to enhance the speed of an online store such as optimize image compress, accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), instant page.
Shopify merchants can make reference to the list below.
- SearchPie SEO & Speed optimize
SearchPie app provides users with a comprehensive solution of speed.
One of the most important features in the age of information technology.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
To optimize a website’s interface for mobile, you can use AMP feature. After pressing on Accelerated mobile page, you will see the preview interface when displaying on mobile phone.
Click to Preview button to go to full site and make a few changes before publish.
Additionally, SearchPie allows users to apply AMP feature to many types of page such as homepage, product page, blog page.
Image compress
To compress images with SearchPie, you have 2 options: bulk compress and compress specific products.
Notice that this app only supports JPG and JPEG format only.
- Booster: Page Speed Optimizer
With Booster, you can use some specific features that help instantly improve your slow website speed.
- Google Page Speed: This feature allows you to check your Google PageSpeed Insights scores and explore which factors are affecting your store speed.
- Real User Monitoring Report: This report displays real-world user experience, so you can monitor your day-by-day performance and take actions accordingly.
- Instant Page Speed: Activate this feature helps you preload links immediately, so it will enhance user experience.
- Image optimization: This function helps you compress the size of your store while still preserving the image quality.
Summary
To speed up your Shopify store, consider making these changes. Enhancing image optimization, cutting down on requests, and using lazy loading can help your site load more quickly. This should lead to a better experience for users across all your digital platforms and finally your store’s promotion. If you want to boost your Shopify speed optimization, check out our Shopify SEO services for more information.