In today’s fast-paced digital world, the speed of your online store can make or break your business. The Shopify speed score has become a critical factor for e-commerce success, directly impacting customer experience and conversion rates. As we approach 2025, understanding and optimizing your store’s performance is more crucial than ever, with search engines and customers alike demanding lightning-fast load times and smooth interactions.
This article will explore why the Shopify Core Web Vitals matters and how it affects your bottom line.
We’ll dive into the nuts and bolts of Shopify Core Web Vitals, showing you how to boost your store’s performance. You’ll learn practical tips to optimize your site speed, future-proof your store for the coming years, and stay ahead of the competition in the ever-evolving e-commerce landscape. By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap to improve your Shopify store’s speed and drive more sales.
Understanding Shopify Speed Score
What is Shopify Speed Score?
The Shopify speed score is a crucial metric that measures how quickly your online store loads in Shopify’s test environment. It’s based on Google Lighthouse performance metrics and is updated daily to reflect any improvements or changes you make to your store. This score is essential because it directly impacts your customers’ shopping experience and can affect your store’s success.
A decent Shopify speed score would be 50, in which anything above 70 is considered good. That being said, a good Shopify store should get a score between 35 and 58 on Google PageSpeed (whereas Google ranks everything below 90 as slow). Keep in mind that a sluggish storefront can turn potential customers away which not only leads to revenue loss, but also may drive them to your rivals.
How is it calculated?
The Shopify speed score is calculated using a weighted average of Google Lighthouse performance scores for three key pages of your store:
- Your store’s homepage
- The product page with the most traffic over the last 7 days
- The collection page with the most traffic over the last 7 days
Shopify considers the relative traffic of these pages compared to similar stores in your industry when determining the weight of these performance scores. This process is monitored for 7 days to ensure accuracy.
Key metrics involved
The Shopify speed score is based on five key metrics that contribute to the overall performance of your store:
- First Contentful Paint (FCP): Tracks how long it takes for the first piece of content to be drawn on the screen. Provides feedback that the page is loading.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): LCP gages how fast the largest element on the screen becomes visible, approximating when the main content of the page is visible to users.
- Speed Index: This quantifies how quick the content is visually (instead of just completely loaded) during page load.
- Total Blocking Time (TBT): Measured as the total amount of time in milliseconds when a page is unresponsive to user input, like clicks, taps and key-presses.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS quantifies how often users experience unexpected layout shifts, helping to ensure visual stability of the page.
Together, these metrics help create a full view of how your store is doing. A thing to note is that your Shopify store speed score relates to more page structure and content rather than direct speed.
To boost your Shopify speed score and store performance overall, you have to concentrate on optimizing images, ditching unused apps, clearing out leftover code from previously installed apps, minify your code if possible, Get rendering-blocking javascript codes out the way and hopefully lazy load all images as well as videos. This was just one hypothetical example but you get the point: by using restocking, upgrading product descriptions and labels (and good jokes) or weeding out under-performing items at a location can boost that store’s metrics and might increase their SERP as well.
It’s a good reminder that some of these metrics are only calculated based on what happens after traffic, thus it may take awhile for changes you make in your online store to instantly impact speed score. To determine if small changes have a big impact, always keep an eye to your Core Web Vitals and web performance dashboard.
The Impact of Speed on Conversions
Correlation between speed and sales
Shopify speed score directly impacts sales and conversions By speeding up your web page, you boost user experience and happy customers convert better! Research says that if a website does not load within 100 milliseconds there could be a decrease in conversion rate by up to 7%. The 3-second rule: If you want to maximize sales, your page has to load in less than 3 seconds.
This relationship between speed and sales is even more critical on mobile. This may be a bit surprising to some, but not really, as a delay in content and mobile load time can affect mobile conversions 20% lower by just one second! As it stands, if a page takes longer than three seconds to load, more than 50% of mobile site visitors will leave — showing just how important fast performance is in the world of m-commerce.
Case studies and statistics
The importance of speed for online stores is reflected in numerous case studies and statistics. For example, Akamai’s Online Retail Performance Report based on an analysis of data from about 10 billion user visits to large online retailers over a month. In fact, they uncovered a two-second delay in web page load time that increases bounce rates by 103%.
Another study by Portent revealed that a B2B site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3 times higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds. This impact becomes even more significant when the difference is further exaggerated, with a B2B site loading in 1 second having a conversion rate 5 times higher than a site that loads in 10 seconds.
E-commerce Sector-Vodafone ran an A/B test to gauge the effect of Web Vitals Optimizations in E-commerce. They found that boosts in the speed of LCP and their lead-to-visit rate (15% increase), cart-to-visit rate (11% increase) and sales (8% increase).
User experience factors
The performance of the e-commerce websites heavily depends on the speed. A good user experience can lead to increased sales and higher revenue. From clear navigation, usability, relevance or quality of information up to an attractive design and fast loading.
When it comes to speed, users have high expectations. According to research, 83% of online users expect websites they visit to load in three seconds or less. If a site fails to meet these expectations, it can lead to cart abandonment and lost sales. In fact, 79% of shoppers who have trouble with site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again.
In addition, your brand is influenced by speed and how visitors experience you. The harsh reality is a slow site can lead to customers perceiving your online store as out-of-date or even shady, turn them away, and hurt your brand image. In contrast, a slow website frustrates users, turns them off and makes them bounce away not to come back again — which is bad for business.
Optimizing Your Shopify Store for Speed
Image optimization techniques
You can start with image optimization and work towards improving your Shopify speed score. Images make up 50% to 75% of a web page’s total weight,so they have quite an affect on load times. To help with this, compress and resize your images without losing on quality. You can use things like PingJPG or TinyPNG which will losslessly compress your images, reducing the image file size by up to 80%
When uploading product images, aim for a maximum size of 2048 x 2048 pixels, as recommended by Shopify. This ensures high quality while keeping file sizes manageable. Additionally, consider implementing lazy loading for images, especially on collection pages or product galleries. This technique delays loading images until they become visible on the screen, drastically reducing initial page load times.
Theme and app considerations
Your choice of theme and apps can significantly impact your store’s performance. Opt for a clean, fast, and easy-to-navigate theme rather than one with numerous bells and whistles. A streamlined theme can lead to substantial improvements in homepage bounce rates for new visitors.
When it comes to apps, less is more. Shopify recommends using a maximum of around 20 apps. Review your installed apps regularly and remove any that are unused or unnecessary. Each app adds code to your site, potentially slowing it down. Be particularly cautious with apps that add complex features like countdown timers or advanced animations, as these can negatively affect your Shopify Core Web Vitals.
Leveraging Shopify’s infrastructure
Shopify provides several built-in speed optimizations that you can leverage to enhance your store’s performance. By default, Shopify implements browser caching for your site’s internal resources, allowing content like images, JavaScript, and CSS to be stored locally in users’ browsers. This reduces the need to re-download content when viewing the same resource multiple times.
In addition, Shopify uses the Fastly Content Delivery Network (CDN). This content of your site is cached by this CDN in their servers around the world, and hence physical distance between your content and users become almost negligible. This means that your Shopify speed score would improve which impacts overall website performance.
If you want to delve into using Shopify’s inner working infrastructure, they have image size parameters built right in. They offer the option to download the original image to a minimum size without loss of quality that cuts down file size downloaded from CDN and reduces browser-side scaling.
It is possible to make your store faster by using these optimization methods, customizing Shopify´s powerful environment or choosing your theme and app. Do not forget that even if it is just a small change, improvements in site speed have a drastic impact on conversion rates and thus revenue for your e-commerce business.
Future-Proofing Your Store for 2025
Emerging technologies affecting speed
By 2025, we have several new technologies that will impact Shopify speed scores as well as store performance overall. Leading the charge in these revolutions are artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), which are empowering an age of hyper-personalization and ushering in a new customer shopping experience. These technologies — which would sift through loads of customer data in real-time to predict new customer order preferences and offer better products — could improve conversions.
Augmented reality (AR) is well on its way to reshaping e-commerce. In the US alone, it is expected that by 2025 there will be more than 100 million AR users or over 32% of the population. Through AR, customers can see what products look like in the real world before they buy them, which also bridges that online vs. in-store gap. It has the capacity to make buyers feel more secure in their decision and decrease return rates which can translate to better Shopify Core Web Vitals.
Predicted user expectations
As we look towards 2025, user expectations for online shopping experiences are evolving rapidly. Customers will demand faster, more seamless interactions with e-commerce platforms. The ideal loading time for a homepage is expected to be between 2-4 seconds, with bounce rates nearly tripling for pages that take longer than three seconds to load.
Mobile commerce is set to dominate, with projections indicating that 62% of all e-commerce will be conducted via mobile devices by 2027. This shift necessitates responsive design and optimized mobile experiences to meet user expectations and maintain high Shopify speed scores.
Staying ahead of the competition
To future-proof your Shopify store and stay ahead of the competition, focus on implementing cutting-edge technologies and optimizing your site’s performance. Consider adopting AI-powered chatbots to provide instant, personalized customer service. These advanced chatbots will be capable of guiding product searches, facilitating transactions, and even processing refunds, mimicking human-like interactions.
It provides composable commerce that empowers you to assemble a tech stack tailored best fit for your store. This allows you to quickly pivot along with technology changes and changing customer requirements without being stuck in a vendor lock-in. Consumers want more sustainable products so prioritize this in your business practices. More than 70% of shoppers expect to pay a premium for sustainably sourced goods by 2025.
Lastly, invest in robust data analytics and AI-driven insights to continually refine your store’s performance. Regularly monitor your Shopify speed score and Core Web Vitals, making data-driven decisions to optimize your site’s speed and user experience. By staying proactive and adapting to emerging technologies and user expectations, you’ll position your Shopify store for success in 2025 and beyond.
Conclusion
The Shopify speed score is one of the standards that online stores must meet in order to be successful in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Store owners can increase their speed scores and improve user experience by ensuring images are optimized, themes and apps are streamlined, and Shopify’s infrastructure is utilized. This is then reflected in the form of higher conversions, more satisfied customers and ultimately…more sales.
Looking ahead to 2025, staying on top of emerging technologies and meeting evolving user expectations will be key to future-proofing Shopify stores. By embracing AI, AR, and mobile-first design, while also prioritizing sustainability and data-driven decision-making, store owners can position themselves for success in the coming years. Remember, even small improvements in site speed can make a big difference in the competitive world of e-commerce.
