Why is my site so slow and what can I do to fix it?

Tools you can use => lighthouse, gtmetrix, google speed insights

WHY IS MY SHOPIFY SITE SO SLOW AND WHAT CAN I DO TO FIX IT? Why is my Shopify site so slow and what can I do to fix it?

Important: ranking factor + users leave faster a site that takes too long to load

1. Diagnostic with Google Speed Insights and GT Metrix
2. Understand what impacts page speed
3. How to improve page speed
4. Caching services that are worthwhile (Edgemesh and Nitropack)

Blog post: Why is my Shopify site so slow and what can I do to fix it? At the moment, efficiency of incoming webpage traffic is the top problem of e-commerce. Website conversion provides the difference between a successful business project and a failure.

How many people visit your website and close it immediately over poor quality, design and low loading speed on a mobile device? How many products remain unsold on your trading platform? How to increase your website income and to improve search positions in Google search rankings and similar engines? And the only answer to all these questions is your website performance.

Yes, some people say they’ve passed tests on ‘Google Insight’ and their webpage is rather fast for desktops and that’s more than enough. In fact, it is not. At the moment, only mobile traffic provides the real purchasing power as it determines the difference between a successful business and an average one.

Today, loading speed and performance on mobile devices is the most important factor leading to success. There is a huge proportion of customers who buy products only using their mobile devices. Thus, the faster a website operates, the more people purchase. The website performance also affects the efficiency of advertising campaigns, search engines rankings and behavioral metrics (in this case, a bounce rate). So, if you already have an online store and you want to increase your income as quickly as possible - our service could be very useful to you.

How any Internet project is launched at the moment? Most likely, you create a shop on such a platform as Shopify, WordPress with WooCommerce or Magento, etc., then you fill your store with goods, buy a theme template with a beautiful design and launch your project.

Only large projects with huge start-up funds are thinking about hiring professional developers, who create an exclusive online store and a unique theme template, test all features of future website, and only after that launch the project in production.

But 90% owners of an online stores buy a theme template and believe that this is quite enough. And that is the main problem – there is a plenty of them on the market, but most of them are of poor quality. Perhaps, they look pretty and you like them, but you can’t even imagine how much bulky, complex and slow they could be.

The main reason of this is that normally themes templates are developed by designers who create nice design, then take third-party plug-ins for animation, sliders, and various effects, merge them all together into one file of scripts and css styles (display styles) and add them to the theme template. As a result, the output could be following: you buy a beautiful theme template, turn some elements on or off. Mostly, you need just 5-10% of all features of the theme but it normally has up to 3-5 different design options, which can connect their own widgets and plug-ins for a specific option. You choose a version you like, leave a couple of plug-ins and feel satisfied completing the design customization. But the fact is that all plug-ins and all widgets of the chosen theme remain enabled and keep performing in the background - you just cannot see them as the designer turned their display off, but your processor and RAM are overloaded and in the end, that factor eventually leads to site load deceleration.

Now a few words about browser performance and how your information is processed and displayed on website. Browser reads webpage from top to bottom. If there is a large image on website, it is downloaded (browser stops reading process and waits for full download of the image), and only after the end of the download process it continues reading the webpage. Animation scripts, plug-ins, widgets, display styles, advertising companies proceed the same way.

So, it takes a plenty of time before a webpage is displayed (rendered) to you on a screen. This time period has its name - DOM CONTENT LOADED. It is time to fully load all the DOM (Document Object Model) elements of webpage. It primarily affects the FCP parameter (https://gtmetrix.com/blog/first-contentful-paint-explained/) responsible for content rendering for user. The lower this parameter, the faster a user can start working with a website. Google pays great attention to this parameter (https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/critical-rendering-path/). Last year, the company even released a special update (https://searchengineland.com/google-speed-update-page-speed-will-become-ranking-factor-mobile-search-289904): the lower this parameter the higher webpage would be in search results.

So, when all the elements are loaded, site plug-in scripts start running. These scripts are responsible for the entire performance, animation and features of website. 90% of all theme templates are launched simultaneously regardless of whether you turn them on or off. You may have noticed that a webpage seems to be fully loaded, but you are still unable to use it though elements of the webpage are already displayed on the screen. And that happens exactly due to the fact that all the elements and features start running simultaneously - the so-called bottleneck effect takes action. Thus, browser requires more and more resources to process all the scripts and it consumes more and more processor resources and RAM. Perhaps you noticed that Google Chrome slows down when you download a website?

You already know the reason of it, and now imagine what happens when the same actions takes place on a mobile phone. All phones are different, and they are way slower in terms of computer productivity. So, you now understand how slow their performance could be. And that problem has a name too - TIME INTERACTIVE. The parameter shows how quickly a user is able to start working with website, and now remember that everything is being loaded simultaneously. So, what happens next? That's right, user gets tired of waiting for so long and he just leaves your website that means your money disappear like the sand slipping through your fingers.

So, we provide next services to help you to avoid all the above problems and to maximize your income.

1) Lazy loading of all your images on the site, including background images 2) Lazy loading of CSS scripts and inline loading 3) Delayed start scripts 4) Optimized image output using the technology of responsive images that is each screen resolution gets its own image. In other words, if the desktop version receives a 2048x2048 resolution picture, the mobile version loads a resized image to be displayed with no quality loss, but at the same time much smaller, which greatly affects webpage performance. The lesser size the entire page has (including total size of all images) the faster your website operates. 5) Use of a new image format designed for the web - Progressive Jpeg Format - https://www.liquidweb.com/kb/what-is-a-progressive-jpeg/ It optimizes your images with no loss of quality: if a picture size is 800KB in PNG format, for example, this format compresses it down to 100KB 6) CSS styles optimization, applying only styles actually used on website 7) JS scripts optimization - this is the most important feature - our Knowhow. We analyze all the scripts on your website in details connecting only those that you use and customize them the way you could get rid of the bottle neck effect forever.