What Shopify website owner should check before launching its store?

How many people visit your website and close it immediately over poor quality, design, and low loading speed on a mobile device? How many products remain unsold on your trading platform? How to increase your website income and to improve search positions in Google search rankings and similar engines? And the only answer to all these questions is your website performance.

Yes, some people say they’ve passed tests on ‘Google Insight’ and their webpage is rather fast for desktops and that’s more than enough. Well, it is not. At the moment, only mobile traffic provides real purchasing power as it determines the difference between a successful business and an average one.

Thus, the faster a website operates, the more people purchase. The website performance also affects the efficiency of advertising campaigns, search engine rankings, and behavioral metrics (in this case, a bounce rate). So, if you already have an online store and you want to increase your income as quickly as possible - our service could be very useful to you.

How any Internet project is launched at the moment? Most likely, you create a shop on such a platform as Shopify, WordPress with WooCommerce or Magento, etc., then you fill your store with goods, buy a theme template with a beautiful design and launch your project.

Only large projects with huge start-up funds are thinking about hiring professional developers, who create an exclusive online store and a unique theme template, test all features of future website, and only after that launch the project in production.

But 90% of online store owners buy a theme template and believe that this is quite enough. And that is the main problem – there is plenty of them on the market, but most of them are of poor quality. Perhaps, they look pretty and you like them, but you can’t even imagine how much bulky, complex, and slow they could be.

The main reason of this is that normally themes templates are developed by designers who create a nice design, then take third-party plug-ins for animation, sliders, and various effects, merge them all into one file of scripts and CSS styles (display styles) and add them to the theme template. As a result, the output could be the following: you buy a beautiful theme template, turn some elements on or off.

Mostly, you need just 5-10% of all features of the theme but it normally has up to 3-5 different design options, which can connect their widgets and plug-ins for a specific option. You choose a version you like, leave a couple of plug-ins, and feel satisfied completing the design customization. But the fact is that all plug-ins and all widgets of the chosen theme remain enabled and keep performing in the background - you just cannot see them as the designer turned their display off, but your processor and RAM are overloaded and in the end, that factor eventually leads to site load deceleration.

The browser reads webpage from top to bottom. If there is a large image on a website, it is downloaded (browser stops reading process and waits for full download of the image), and only after the end of the download process, it continues reading the webpage. Animation scripts, plug-ins, widgets, display styles, advertising companies proceed the same way.

It is time to fully load all the Document Object Model ( DOM ) elements of the webpage. It primarily affects the FCP parameter responsible for content rendering for the user. The lower this parameter, the faster a user can start working with a website. Google pays great attention to this parameter. Last year, the company even released a special update: the lower this parameter the higher webpage would be in search results.

You may have noticed that a webpage seems to be fully loaded, but you are still unable to use it though elements of the webpage are already displayed on the screen. And that happens exactly due to all the elements and features start running simultaneously - the so-called bottleneck effect takes action. Thus, the browser requires more and more resources to process all the scripts and it consumes more and more processor resources and RAM. Perhaps you noticed that Google Chrome slows down when you download a website?

Now imagine what happens when the same actions take place on a mobile phone. All phones are different, and they are way slower in terms of computer productivity. So, you now understand how slow their performance could be