Your shop's speed.

An online shop that loads slowly can be frustrating and can lead to fewer visitors to your shop, which in turn leads to lower turnover. Google prefers pages that load quickly and have a low bounce rate. Faster load time = your pages rank higher in the search results. So if your shop has a loading speed problem, it needs to be dealt with as quickly as possible.

How is your shop's loading speed measured?

There are a number of tools out there that can test the loading speed of your online shop.

Webpagetest.org (opens in a new tab) and Pingdom (opens in a new tab), just to name a couple.

It is important to remember that total sales are the most important measure in the end. In other words, a fast page that sells considerably less than a slightly slower page may be worse than the other way round. Try testing the speed of your biggest competitors – then you may have the answer to what they have found out about that question through their own analysis.

Also remember to test the speed of pages other than the home page – it is only one of many pages in your shop.

What can I do myself?

There are various things you can look at that may slow down the loading speed of your shop.

Is it only slow for me?

Remember that your online shop's load time depends on a number of factors, both local (i.e. related to your local internet connection) and non-local (i.e. related to your online shop's design). For example, if you use a newer computer or have a fast internet connection, your site may load faster than if you use an older computer on a slow internet connection.

If you feel that your online shop loads slowly, the first step is to check whether the problem is local or not. To do this, you can try accessing your online shop from different computers on different networks and see whether the problem occurs there too.

If it is confirmed that your online shop runs slowly on all computers and networks, it is time to take a look at the content of your online shop.

You are running too many plugins/scripts

With thousands of clever plugins promising to do amazing things for your online shop, it is easy to get caught up.

This is a problem for several reasons. First, the more plugins you have, the more time your online shop has to spend loading them. And second, not all plugins are equally well made, and outdated plugins can slow your online shop's performance down drastically.

Evaluate your current plugins and work out which ones you actually need. Remove plugins that perform the same functions, plugins you no longer use, and those that were made more than 5 years ago and have never been updated. Consider whether they are all worth the extra load time.

Plugins can be, e.g.: Sleeknote, chat (e.g. tawk.to), Hello Retail (formerly AddWish), HappyOrNot – which have been added via Integration > Other integrations.

Your slider contains many images/products

It is of course clever to be able to show customers lots of different new products that automatically slide back and forth. But how long do visitors spend looking at your home page? If you have a slider with 40 products, showing 4 at a time for 6 seconds each – the customer has to sit and look at the slider for a whole minute to see all the products – hardly anyone is going to do that. And the shop still has to load all 40 images before the page is completely ready.

Choose how many products you want to show, e.g. set a maximum of 12 if you show 4 at a time. That gives 3 slides, and customers probably won't spend longer than that looking at your home page. Consider putting other content in instead of a slider. That could be, e.g., an image with a text and a link instead.

Your beautiful images take up too much space

The larger the size and the better the quality of an image, the longer it takes to load. If you have fantastic graphics and an image or two (or more) for each product, your load time will be slower.

There are a couple of ways to solve the image problem. The first step is to make sure the images are compressed as much as possible without the quality getting worse. The shop compresses images itself when you upload them. But PNG images, for example, are hard to compress. Keep these images to a minimum. Upload JPEG images instead. JPEG images are already compressed, but the image quality is still good enough for most of your online shop's images.

Other things that can affect the speed

Audio files, especially when they are set to autoplay, can have an effect on your online shop's loading speed.

Adding videos (YouTube or Vimeo) to your online shop can also affect the speed. On top of that, setting videos to autoplay can also have a negative effect on your visitors.