What Is a Good Shopify Speed Score
& How To Improve

Improving your Shopify speed score — which measures how fast your site loads and its overall performance — is your path to:

• Increased conversions
• Higher search engine optimization (SEO) rankings
• A better user experience

When your score goes up, visitors will stay longer in your store and make more purchases. Your site will also rise in ranking in popular search engines.

Explore what makes a good Shopify speed score and get practical tips on how to improve it and gain an advantage over your marketplace competitors.

Understanding Shopify Speed Scores

Every merchant who uses Shopify receives a speed score to understand how their site performs for visitors. Unlike other speed scores like GTmetrix or Pingdom, the Shopify speed score isn’t graded solely on how fast your site loads, making it important you understand the differences to improve your score.

What Is a Shopify Speed Score?

The Shopify speed score is a weighted average of several performance metrics that reflect how your site loads and performs.

The process uses Google Lighthouse, an open-source tool for website audits. It measures factors like loading times and performance scores.

To generate your overall speed score, Shopify takes the weighted average of three metrics from your:

1. Homepage
2. Product page with the most traffic
3. Collection page with the most traffic

What Is Considered a Good Shopify Speed Score?

A Shopify speed score can range from 0-100, with zero being the worst and 100 being the best. Anything below 50 is considered poor, 50-70 is considered acceptable, and anything above 70 is considered good. Most stores in Shopify start at around 25-30, while most major big-name brands achieve scores of 90 or higher.

Over time, Google has emphasized different performance metrics for ranking but has settled on three core web vitals that largely determine your rankings:

1. Largest contentful paint
2. First input delay
3. Cumulative layout shift

These changes in ranking prioritization mean you need to take a more comprehensive look at improving site performance instead of focusing solely on loading speed. Sites like PageSpeed Insights help complement the scores you get from Shopify.

Why Shopify Speed Scores Matter

Because the Shopify speed score considers your entire site performance, it has several significant impacts on how your website generates visibility and customers.

Impact on Bounce Rates and Conversion Rates

When sites take too long to load, visitors are more likely to leave before viewing your products. According to Google, the bounce rate increases by 32% if the page load time goes from one to three seconds.

Faster websites provide a better shopping experience and lead to higher conversion rates. Customers are encouraged to stay, browse, and make purchases with better navigation and loading times.

SEO and Core Web Vitals

Google Lighthouse emphasizes the core web vitals outlined earlier in this article, making them critical to a site’s SEO. Since Shopify speed scores are based on these fundamental factors, improving your scores through Shopify is a shortcut to improving organic search performance.

Tools like PageSpeed Insights can create a comprehensive system for optimizing core web vitals and boosting your search rankings.

Factors Affecting Your Shopify Speed Score

Optimizing your Shopify speed score will improve your SEO rankings, but what elements in your store need to change to achieve this?

Third-Party Apps

Any third-party apps you add to your Shopify store require more code or scripts, which Shopify must process before loading your site. If you add too many or poorly optimized apps, your loading times will be negatively affected.

Limit the number of apps you use and regularly audit their performance. Remove any non-essential apps or look for lightweight alternatives that cause minimal impact.

Themes and Custom Code

Often, Shopify themes with fancy animations or lots of features include bulky code that will add extra load time to your site.

If you want customized features for your store, work with a developer who can create a clean and efficient theme code that doesn’t affect site speed. Performance-optimized lightweight themes will also reduce load times.

Large Images and Media

High-resolution images and videos may look great, but they weigh down the site’s processing times and cause your site’s load speeds to slow down.

Utilize techniques like lazy loading, which delays loading media until they are seen on a webpage, so your site doesn’t load everything at once.

How To Improve Your Shopify Speed Score

With a basic understanding of what factors affect your Shopify online store speed score, it’s time to take action to improve your site.

Optimizing Images and Videos

Depending on how many products you offer, you could have hundreds of images on your site. Each one needs to be optimized to improve your overall speed score.

Compress and Resize Images

Compressing product images reduces their size without significantly lowering their quality. Online tools like TinyPNG can compress hundreds of images for you to improve your loading times. Shopify also has a built-in image resizer that will help reduce your file sizes.

Implement Lazy Loading

Shopify includes an option for lazy loading on your store. This will help with speed scores by delaying the loading of non-essential media until they are needed. In other words, your images will only load when someone scrolls to them instead of all at once.

Video Optimization

Directly adding videos to your store means the site must process those videos every time someone wants to see the page, increasing load times. Hosting your videos on third-party platforms like YouTube reduces your site processing times and makes loading easier.

Minimize Third-Party Apps

Third-party apps add more code and scripts to your site, which takes longer to process. This is a key area to improve to increase your speed score.

Evaluate Your Apps Regularly

Set up a monthly audit on your site where you go through all your apps to determine which ones are non-essential. Then, regularly remove any apps you aren’t using or don’t add much value to help improve your site performance.

Use Lightweight App Alternatives

Removing non-essential apps doesn’t mean you can’t have those features on your site. Do some extra research and find app alternatives that prioritize speed performance while giving you the desired features.

Caching and Browser Optimization

A more advanced technique that optimizes site performance is caching; Shopify makes it easy to incorporate this into your store.

Enable Shopify’s Built-in Caching

Usually, when someone visits your store, Shopify must pull all of the copy, images, scripts, and styles from an off-site server where the information is stored. This takes time and increases your loading times.

Caching means copies of your website’s elements are stored on the visitor’s local device after their first visit. Every time they return, Shopify can quickly load these files to speed up the loading process.

Utilize Browser Caching

It’s best to work with a developer to enable browser caching on your Shopify store. The process involves adding a few lines of code to your backend to help store your site’s key files on site visitors’ local drives.

Achieving a Great Spotify Speed Score

Your Shopify Speed Score reflects the overall customer experience, and the more you improve it, the better your chances of converting customers and ranking high on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Use tools like PageSpeed Insights and Google Lighthouse to regularly monitor your site’s performance and identify areas for improvement. Blink Vitals uses advanced AI technology and user-friendly automation to transform your Shopify store into a conversion machine.

Contact us today to get started on the path to Shopify speed optimization.