Businesses are built from the ground up. But they're optimized from the inside out. 

With 2022 drawing to a swift close, brands everywhere are looking to end the year on a high with a strong Q4...

And no Q4 forecast is complete without a game plan for the biggest shopping period of the year. 

Black Friday Cyber Monday 2022 is just around the corner. And although this extended weekend makes up just over 1% of the annual calendar, it’s the cornerstone of the entire three months surrounding them. 

There's a lot riding on how well your brand can rise to the occasion. 

Tiny deviations in performance could be the difference between looking back on this as a year to remember... or regretting the mistakes you made along the way. 

With all this in mind, it's easy to understand why some brands obsess about getting an edge over their competitors any way they can. 

As we profiled in our last piece on BFCM, the cost of reaching prospects skyrocket around this period as businesses across every industry compete for the most valuable resource of all: consumer attention. 

With these increased costs comes a need for higher ROAS. 

To ensure they get the best possible returns, ecommerce brands pay a hefty premium to agencies, freelancers, and in-house specialists to get the most from every dollar spent. 

This makes perfect sense. When the fate of your holiday campaigns depends on hitting certain targets on the frontend, you need to do everything you can to optimize your performance. 

Here at Loox, we know that solid social proof (in the form of visual reviews) makes a massive difference when it comes to driving more sales, increasing conversions, and landing more customers. 

That’s true whether you’re sharing reviews as part of your ad funnel, directly on campaign landing pages, or anywhere else throughout your site (e.g. on product pages or the checkout page).

However, great visual reviews are only an asset to your business if visitors stick around long enough to read them. 

That’s why, despite how important ad performance is, there's something else that matters even more: 

Your website. 

How well your site looks, feels and performs across key pages (like your homepage, product page, checkout page and so on) is critical to the success of everything you do.

Think of it this way: 

Not everyone who buys from you during the holiday season will be reached by one of your ads...

But unless you're using shoppable feeds and the like, every single customer who completes a purchase will do so on your website. 

And as a starting point on your CRO journey, there’s no area better to focus on than speed.

Ensuring your site loads quickly is fundamental to any conversion rate maximization plan.  

In this article, we’re going to cover the fundamentals of speed optimization by sharing five tips any brand can use to take their site load times from “so-so” to super-quick.

To make this as easy as possible to follow along with, we’ll focus on small changes you can make to your existing site that will have an outsized impact - without needing you to invest tons of time, effort, or money.

As an added bonus, you can <email-form-alt-link>download a free copy of our Lightspeed Load Times Checklist here.<email-form-alt-link>

This quick-fire doc will summarize the key points of this article and give you a step-by-step game plan you can implement before BFCM 2022. 

We'll also send you a few actionable emails laying out the exact process for turning these insights into action. 

Let's get started!

First Things First - Will Visual Reviews Slow Down My Site? 

‍Not if you use Loox. 

It’s easy to think that an image-heavy application like Loox would have a negative impact on your site’s performance… 

But as we’ll cover later in this article, Loox is built from the ground up to be lightweight. That means you can showcase visual reviews anywhere on your site without getting in your users’ way.  

Performance-orientated engineering and constant improvement of our systems allow us to help great brands like Soultanicals, Project Repat and Precision Metal Art experiencing the full power of visual reviews without slowing down their superfast load times.

Check out the following:

An A Grade in GTMetrix is exceptionally fast, while a B Grade is also well above average. For sites with heavy emphasis on visuals, these are fantastic scores.

These are big businesses with a lot to lose if their site doesn’t load quickly. But thanks to Loox’s superior engineering, they don’t need to choose between speedy response times and great social proof. They can have both… 

And reap all the rewards these advantages bring. 

So, if you’re interested in leveraging photo reviews on your site, don’t worry - you can absolutely do this without compromising on speed. 

By using the five tips we share in this article, you’ll be able to optimize the speed of your Shopify store to a world-class level. Pair that with awesome reviews from happy customers and you’ve got a recipe for serious success.  

Lightning Site Speed - 5 Tips to Achieve Blazingly Fast Load Times

Patience is a virtue - but not one you should test your customers on.

Consider the following: 

1. Over a decade ago, Amazon calculated that every additional 100ms (that's just one-tenth of a second) of latency beyond baseline cost them 1% of sales. 
2. According to Google, web pages that take ~5 seconds to load can lose 90% of potential users before they interact with it even once. 
3. Research by Akamai determined that as little as a one-second increase in page load times reduces conversion rate by 26%. 
4. 70% of consumers report that page load times impact their willingness to buy - and half said they would be willing to give up animation + video for faster load times. 

When it comes to speed, the statistics are clear. Consumers expect rapid response times, snappy interactions and zero friction as they browse the web. 

These expectations are heavily shaped by two factors outside of your control: 

1. Your customer's experience of using other sites. Billion-dollar companies like Twitter, Meta, Instagram, Amazon and TikTok set the bar for speed - everything else needs to either fall in line or look worse by comparison. 
2. Declining consumer attention spans. Whether it’s down to abundant competition in your niche, an increase in short-form media consumption or general market trends, people don’t pay attention as well as they used to. To stand any chance of keeping them engaged, you need to deliver the payoff as fast you can. 

When it comes to meeting your customer's high standards for speed, the deck is stacked against you...

But we’ve got you covered. (Lucky you).

It’s possible to take your site from so-so to superspeed using these five tips: 

Tip #1 - Benchmark & monitor site speed using best-in-class testing tools. 

It’s hard to hit your targets when you don’t know where to aim in the first place. That’s why our first tip is this: 

Figure out where you’re aiming. And put systems in place to see how close you get. 

Speed testing tools like GTMetrix and Google Page Speed Insights help you identify ways you can speed up the performance of your site.

The value of using services like these is two-fold: 

1. They give you an easy way to see how well your store is performing right now - what things are causing issues, and what things don’t need to be looked at. 
2. They let you track the results of whatever changes you make, helping you figure out if you’re moving in the right direction. 

Assessing your performance using tools like these is key to crafting a site that loads fast and feels snappy for end users, so don’t neglect to add one of these to your optimization stack.

Action Step = Benchmark site speed using a free tool like GTMetrix or Google Page Speed Insights. Monitor it routinely (weekly at a minimum), and use it whenever you make significant changes to see their impact on site load times. 

Tip #2 - Minimize server load by making smart image choices. 

Unless your site has a ton of JS, animation and so on (which we’ll address in another point), slow loading times are usually caused by issues with images.

These issues can take a couple of different forms: 

1. Images which are uploaded at a larger resolution than required. E.g. if an image only needs to be 1000 px x 1000 px max, a file bigger than this will need to be “re-rendered” at the correct size when it’s loaded. This has negative consequences for site speed. 
2. Images which are not sufficiently compressed. You can carry out “lossless” compression of most JPGs and PNGs. This reduces file size and speeds up load times. Failing to do this will negatively impact your site speed.
3. Use of animated imagery over lighter static resources. Think carefully before embedding large GIFs or autoplay background video. Oftentimes, static imagery can do just as good a job as something animated. If animation is integral to your site, consider whether you can carry out “lossy” compression or convert those files to a leaner format. 
4. Loading all images on a page at once. As a general principle, any image which appears below the fold on a given page doesn’t need to be loaded immediately. Instead, you can defer the loading of off-screen images. This is known as “lazy loading”. This reduces the length of time site visitors spend waiting for your website to load for them, which helps to deliver a better user experience.

Action Step = Audit your homepage, landing pages and store overall for the following issues. Check to ensure that images are uploaded at the correct size, have been compressed sufficiently, are the correct format, and that lazy loading is enabled. 

Tip #3 - Set yourself up to benefit from Shopify’s built-in infrastructure. 

As ecommerce platforms go, Shopify has a lot of advantages when it comes to speed optimization. 

Alternatives like WooCommerce or Magento typically need a lot of fine-tuning to load quickly. But with Shopify, you get the following as standard: 

1. Delivery of site content using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) backed by Cloudflare. This ensures that your website files are loaded from servers which are close to your user’s physical location, helping to reduce latency.
2. Automatic caching of site content. Caching is the practice of storing files from your website (images, text and code) in your client’s browser so that they only need to be loaded from your server once. The rationale behind caching is that it reduces load times once a page has been visited once by tapping into files stored on the user’s local device. 
3. Automatic minification of cacheable JS and CSS files. This means that users can visit your site once and keep enjoying the faster load times caching offers until your theme is updated. 

"70% of consumers report that page load times impact their willingness to buy - and half said they would be willing to give up animation + video for faster load times."

But depending on how your store is set up, these speed optimization assets may not be enough. 

It’s great to be able to leverage caching and Shopify’s native CDN to minimize load times. But if your theme relies on tons of custom code and your media assets are being served inefficiently, you’ll limit how much benefit you can get. 

Shopify stores are built using Liquid, HTML, CSS and JS code. There are efficient and inefficient ways to construct this code: both in terms of how it delivers a particular piece of functionality, and what functionality it delivers in the first place. 

If you want to get the best out of your store, you need to make sure that your theme is as lean as it can be. 

In practice, it makes sense to start with a lightweight framework and build on it sparingly. Unless you have a talented developer to help, coding your own theme from scratch almost always has a negative effect on site speed.

However, whether your theme is completely custom or an off-the-shelf purchase, there are ways you improve its performance.

Speed tests carried out using tools like GTMetrix and Page Speed Insights will help you to identify problematic code. With this knowledge, you can then work with a developer to mitigate the impact of these problems on your site speed. 

Action Step = Work with an experienced Shopify Expert to define the major stumbling blocks in your build. Focus on reducing bottlenecks across your core pages (home page, product pages, key landing pages etc.). Oftentimes, a light touch can go a long way. 

Tip #4 - Avoid bloated third-party integrations.

Beyond just optimizing your site code, you also need to be careful about the impact of apps and integrations on load times. 

According to a report by speed optimization experts YOTTAA, 62% of third-party integrations have a negative impact on site load times.  

Consider the following: 

1. On average, every third-party integration increases time to interactivity by 124 milliseconds.
2. Three in four Shopify merchants use apps on their store, and the average store has six apps installed. 
3. Shopify Apps aren’t the only third-party integrations commonly used on ecommerce sites. Google Analytics is found on 98% of sites, Facebook and Google Ads pixels on 90%, and Google Tag Manager on 86%.

‍

With the above in mind, it’s easy to see how load times across your entire store could be 1.5 - 2 seconds higher than they need to be if you’re not careful.

Milliseconds matter. Even a small increase in load time could be the difference between making a sale and winning a customer for life… 

Or watching a prospect disappear, never to return again. 

We’ve built Loox with this in mind. Everything about our product is designed for performance:

1. Loox uses a CDN to deliver content as quickly as possible. 
2. Loox content only starts loading after the page is fully loaded (including all scripts and photos).
3. Images served by Loox are optimized to minimize load and maximize impact (they’re appropriately compressed, served at the right resolution and tailored to the device they show on). 

While Loox was awarded a green rating by YOTTAA (indicating it has little to no impact on the site load times), that’s not true of most apps. 

As mentioned above, almost two-thirds of external integrations have a negative impact on site speed. The chances are that there are a couple of apps on your store right now that are slowing down your load times. 

Remember the advice of tip #1. Benchmark site speed and test it before and after you add any new application to see if it affects your store. If it does, think carefully - you need to decide if it’s worth the price. 

Action Step = Audit third-party integrations configured on your site. Consider removing anything you don’t need or actively use. Optimize the integration of anything you do need by choosing the leanest way possible of implementing them (e.g. use a dedicated tag manager rather than integrating multiple tracking codes). 

Tip #5 - Build with mobile in mind. 

Mobile traffic accounts for over 50% of all site visits worldwide… 

And research indicates that 80%+ of Shopify traffic and ~70% of sales revenue comes from mobile visitors.

Over the past number of years, industry best practice has gone from sites being mobile-responsive to mobile-first. 

Rather than simply building a desktop site that adapts to display on smaller screens, leading designers have taken the opposite approach: 

Starting with mobile users in mind and then scaling up their design for larger devices.

Using a website on your phone is a fundamentally different experience to using that same site on your desktop. 

The screen is smaller and has a different orientation. Your method of input is different (thumbs and gestures vs. fingers and keystrokes).  And little issues that you might have ignored on your laptop can turn you off entirely in a different context. 

All of the tips we’ve shared so far in this article will help you to deliver a better user experience to mobile visitors. But there’s one more tip you can use to supercharge your store’s performance on mobile: 

Enable AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) on your site. 

Launched by Google back in 2016, AMP is a feature that allows specific pages on your site to be cached and preloaded in search results, helping them to look like they load instantly.

While your pages have to meet some specific criteria to benefit from this feature, it’s worth the trouble.

Depending on your proficiency and the resources you have available to you, there are two ways you can enable AMP for your store: 

1. Configure it directly in your theme files by creating alternate templates. 
2. Use an app from the Shopify App Store to achieve this (search “AMP” for some recommendations).  

Whichever method you choose, we highly recommend exploring whether it’s possible to implement AMP on your site. The results are more than worth the effort to put it in place. 

Action Step = Review your store and determine if you can enable AMP (either via plugin or custom code). Consult with a developer/Shopify expert if needed, but don’t be afraid to invest in this work. The results will be more than worth it if you can deliver better load times for mobile users. 

Conclusion 

Speed optimization can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. 

Optimizing your website for max conversions is never a bad investment... 

But depending on how much work is involved, it may not always be your best choice.  

We've deliberately selected these five tips because they're fundamental to driving users towards taking action.

Positive customer reviews are key to maximizing conversions for your store. But even if you have tons of social proof sprinkled in all the right places, it won’t help unless visitors stick around long enough to be influenced by it. 

Fast load times are the foundation. Take care of this, and you’ll: 

1. Convert more prospects into customers. 
2. Have an easier time demonstrating your credibility 
3. See better results from every dollar you spend on advertising.
4. Get more mileage out of everything else you do. 

There's a lot more we could say about speed optimization and CRO in general (keep an eye out for future articles on this topic!), but here's the most important lesson you need to remember: 

Ideas are only useful when they're brought to life. 

With the actionable strategies we've covered in this piece, you're now equipped with everything you need to make small (but powerful) changes to your website. 

All that's left is to put this information into practice as soon as you can. 

Time is ticking. The busiest spending period of the year is already underway, and Q4's biggest shopping event is just around the corner. 

Implementing these strategies on your store will set you up to maximize conversions - without needing you to overhaul your site's design or UX.

We'll also send you a few quick, actionable emails to make putting this knowledge to work for your business even easier. 

If you're interested in doing everything possible to make this holiday season a success for your business, don't wait. Now is the time to take action.