Speed up your Shopify website this holiday season without sacrificing user experience. How great is it that Shopify websites let you add Limespot personalized recommendations, Yotpo product reviews, and other features built by 3rd party vendors? Unfortunately, each new 3rd party JavaScript added to your website introduces variability and delays into the shopping experience. This is variability that Shopify infrastructure can’t control, because you are no longer requesting content and data from Shopify servers.  

If any of these 3rd party requests slow down or fail, it will slow down your website page load times. Now is the time to address this, because shoppers won’t wait around for 10 second load times in November. Just ask The Gap and Amazon, who lost millions in holiday sales due to slow loading pages caused by social media and analytics plug-ins.

Here are 3 steps you can take now to speed up your Shopify website for the holidays.

3 Steps to Speed Up Your Shopify Website

1. Measure your 3rd Party Application Performance

Slow Shopify websites have lower conversion rates

Before jumping into a performance optimization project, start by measuring the impact that 3rd party features are having on your website speed and performance. Yottaa offers a free download of RAPID inSITE, which gives you visibility into the speed and performance of your website and 3rd party page elements. It is deployed as a simple beacon on your website that collects data and presents it in the Yottaa analytics portal. This will give you visibility into the size of the problem, and an understanding of whether optimization would have meaningful results. Don’t want to put a beacon on your website? Yottaa can also estimate the impact with a free Performance Site Evaluation from one of our performance engineers.

2. Optimize and Control your 3rd Party Applications

Yottaa has eCommerce acceleration technology called Rapid CTRL that works within the Shopify infrastructure and gives you visibility and control over 3rd party applications. It is installed as a simple line of code, and can improve your page load times by 20-50% in a matter of weeks. Visit our Rapid CTRL technology overview, or register for a free site evaluation to determine if it is right for you.

3. Remove all those 3rd Party Features

This is probably not realistic, but we had to include it. You could quickly speed up your Shopify website by removing all 3rd party applications and rely solely on native Shopify capabilities, but you’d be giving up many of the features and services that built up your current conversion rates.

What Shopify performance improvement can you expect?

Three large Shopify retailers recently deployed Yottaa Rapid CTRL technology to deliver faster loading website pages and control 3rd party application risk. The challenges that led them to Yottaa are outlined in our Shopify with Yottaa Case Study, and tell a consistent story. Each retailer had added new 3rd party features to their site, until their slow pages started driving shoppers away.

Here’s what happened once these Shopify websites started optimizing their 3rd party applications:

– Brand Apparel – 50% faster Shopify website pages (3-5s page load times)

– Sporting Goods Retailer – 21% faster Shopify website pages

– Apparel Retailer – 30% faster Shopify website pages, 3% higher conversion rates

What are you doing to speed up your Shopify website this holiday?

Don’t just sit and hope your website survives the holiday rush. The holidays are about thriving, not just surviving. If your website makes some shoppers wait up to 10s for your page content to load, those shoppers will be taking their holiday spending elsewhere.

The Shopify customers mentioned above increased their website speed by 20-50%, and proved that it is possible to be faster on Shopify without changing your experience. What are you doing to make your Shopify website faster? A great first step is to evaluate your website performance and 3rd party applications. If you can make your Shopify pages load 20-50% faster for all your shoppers before the holidays, imagine how many more orders you will collect this year.