Watch this video by conversion rate experts on YouTube: Website Page Speed Optimization.
In this video, we will share insights from Chris McCarron on how to improve your Shopify conversion rates.
Chris is the owner of GoGoChimp and a leading authority on conversion rate optimization. He has been featured in many major online publications and ran the growth teams at both Roadtrippers and FOMO.
Chris outlines the strategy GoGoChimp used to help a 7 figure entrepreneur with one of his smaller brands on Shopify with conversion rate optimization.
The results are nothing short of spectacular.
Conversion Rate Experts Video Description
Any CRO expert (aka conversion rate experts or conversion rate optimization specialists) that’s worth a damn knows that page speed kills conversion rates faster than Raid kills cockroaches.
Website page speed optimization is one of the easiest ways to grow a business.
In this video, I show you how to improve website page speed and web page loading times by using the same techniques I used to grow this Shopify store from $48k per year to $1.4 million.
(Pssst… Hit Like & Subscribe)
Website Page Speed Optimization Timecodes:
- 0:00 Intro by Conversion Rate Experts
- 01:18 Check Website Speed
- 01:46 Website Speed Test
- 02:16 Website Loading Speed is Important to Google
- 02:22 Slow Website equals Low Conversion Rate
- 02:52 Slow Website Abandonment Rate
- 03:00 Shoppers Expect This Website Loading Speed
- 03:05 Customer Loyalty and Website Page Speed
- 03:08 Why Customers Won’t Return to A Slow Website
- 03:10 Website Page Speed and Bounce Rates
- 03:28 Website Page Speed Stats and Conversion Rates
- 05:00 Use Correct Website Image Sizes
- 05:18 How to Compress Images Including PNG
- 05:25 What is Image Compression?
- 05:33 Image Compression Shopify Apps and WordPress Plugins
- 05:41 Resize Website Images
- 05:50 WebP Lossly Images Smaller Than JPEG Images
- 06:06 Website Sales and Conversion Rates up Because of Page Speed
Hi, I’m Chris McCarron and I’m a conversion rate expert and owner of the CRO agency GoGoChimp.
Have you ever wondered why your website has a high bounce rate?
Well, it could be because your page was taking too long to load.
Website page speed is often the best thing to improve to get more sales.
And it took me less than five minutes to turn this struggling Shopify store into a $1,447,225.17 organic skincare brand.
The truth is that a slow website that isn’t quick to load to desktop or mobile devices kills your search engine rankings.
However, what a lot of people don’t think about is the relationship between Shopify page speed and sales.
Check Website Speed
So let’s rewind a little, shall we?
I helped a client with conversion rate optimization. They owned a Shopify store with annual revenue of $48,000 and I looked at their data.
This told me everything that I needed to know about growing their revenue.
During a live video conference, I opened another tab to browse his website just to see how good it was and if there was any low-hanging fruit.
But there was a problem…
His Shopify store took 20 seconds to load on a desktop.
I knew this was a major problem that needed to be fixed as soon as possible.
To be perfectly honest, as a conversion rate expert, I was amazed that someone who owned a very successful e-commerce brand and had a strong background in marketing could make such a rookie mistake.
Website Speed Test
Using a variety of page speed tools such as GTMetrix, Pingdom and PageSpeed Insights… well things took another turn for the worse.
There’s a lot of different reasons why website page speed optimization is important, but it pretty much boils down to two things: Google hates slow websites because its users hate slow websites; a slow website kills conversion rates.
As a Conversion Rate Expert, a slow Shopify store is easily the number one issue that I find and fix for clients.
That’s because, regardless of what you test, tweak or do to help conversion rates, a slow website equals very few sales.
Website Page Speed Stats
A study conducted in 2016 found that:
- A slow website can result in abandonment rates of up to 75%
- 47% of shoppers want a website page to load in two seconds or less
- Customer loyalty drops by 50% when a website’s page speed is too slow
- 64% of shoppers won’t return if your site takes too long to load
- A 3-second loading time results in a 40% bounce or abandonment rate
The average page load time for this Shopify store ranged from 12.48 seconds to 25.04 seconds.
So I convinced the marketer to allow me to dig into his data, gather additional data where needed, and then submit a conversion audit report.
Use Correct Website Image Sizes
The first change was this:
Shopify and WordPress do a horrible job at serving the right image sizes to visitors.
Correction, Shopify and WordPress themes do a horrible job at this.
Tiny thumbnails use full-size images all the time meaning that even if you only have a few thumbnails on a page, its effect on page speed can be devastating.
The solution was for me to dig into the theme files and to make a few changes to the code so that the correct size of images was being served to visitors.
Website Image Compression
The second change was to compress images.
I don’t want to bore you, so it goes pretty much like this: image compression reduces the file size of images without losing the quality of the image.
There’s plenty of plugins, web apps, and Shopify apps that help you do this with the click of a button.
I highly recommend doing this as this will chop your page speed down.
Resize Images and use Webp Lossly Format
If you want to go a little further, then you can resize all of your images to further reduce their file size and you can also use a more modern image format called webp.
When you take into consideration how many images are on just about every web page on a Shopify store, up to a 34% smaller file size is an even bigger win for your revenue.
Conversion Rate Experts are “Experts” for a reason
So when it came to my client, sales instantly jumped up, and up and up while their ad costs went down, and down and down.
In Slack, I could see the client’s team of developers and marketers getting more and more excited with the manager of the store saying that he couldn’t believe page speed makes such a difference.
However, the client thought it was a fluke, voodoo or some other nonsense.
He completely disregarded the results as well as well documented research conducted by conversion rate optimization experts on the relationship between sales and page speed.
Instead, the 7 figure entrepreneur wanted to reserve judgment until he saw that the numbers for his Shopify store held.
They did hold and then went up and up until it was projected that the store would make $1,447,225 per annum.
Thanks for watching Website Page Speed Optimization and hopefully this video will help you on your journey towards becoming a 7 figure entrepreneur on Shopify.
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