My Website Speed Rating Has Improved
SHORELINE ACCESSORIES
'Simple Luxuries Delicately Made'
Yes, to my astonishment, my website speed rating jumped from a horrible 26 to 11, to 14. Then to 26, having paid an annual premium of about $10 or the equivalent in euro for a booster app called 'Loadify'. Finally, after much scouting, trawling, learning and implementing it suddenly jumped to 34 one day recently. It has dropped again to 33 but I am still glad, surprised and honestly a little bit bemused by it.
Anyone who has been following along will be aware that I have dedicated some of my time and energy to this challenge while trying to do it without totally disappearing down that rabbit hole.
'Bluebell Wood' Art Card by Nuala Brett-King
Towards this goal, I have studied up on YouTube and of course Shopify support videos and the www too. The advice always seems so helpful at first but it becomes quickly apparent that this is a murky and confusing area. Not least because the rate reported by Shopify is a marker so to speak of not only your speed but where you sit in relation to other similar websites.
Therefore, although you may improve your website speed with some tweaks etc, if someone else does similar things and improves their website speed, then you will not notice any movement in your own score and hence you will not have the satisfaction usually gained by cause followed by effect.
Nonetheless, I will briefly outline what I did exactly to see if my efforts correlate to this jump or not... me nearly thinks not..
Steps I Took to Improve My Website Speed
Berets By Parade Handmade
So yes, firstly I looked around to see what I could use to quickly improve website speed as it had plummeted to 11 or something close to 'stopped altogether'. I employed a booster app called Loadify to help with various things like customer retention or at least browser retention. The relevant part of this subscription I took out for the purpose of this blog is the lazy load element. Whereby the whole page is not loaded at once but begins to load on hovering so that when you click the actually wait time seems shorter. The page loads as you scroll and not all at once when you click on the page etc. (This is by no means tech advice or acumen. It is just as I remember it and is probably only sort of explaining so you'll need to look it up if you are really serious about it.)
Then going on the three areas Google focuses on to get what they call your 'Lighthouse' speed or something like that, I focused on the home page. I have the home page set to show a number of images. The first 12 or so images of the collection I had chosen for the homepage. The issue was that I had much much more chosen for that collection but they were redundant in this instance as they were present but not showing unless the homepage was chosen as a collection from the list of collections. I am not sure that removing the excess images actually made the difference or even whether they were really loading each time when only 12 were showing. It is hard to find 'exact practices' advised for this kind of thing either. Google did come by a number of time to test my site speed but it didn't make any difference until this week. As you may surmise, it is really difficult to know if my efforts had the desired effect or if it was caused by something else.
I mentioned on my YouTube channel AmandasParade that I was focused on speeding up my website and I have put out the message of my intent in my blogs also. Maybe the universe is working on this too... Who really knows.
I shed a couple of apps I no longer wanted or where the benefits did not out way the negative effect on my website speed.
I have an app in in place now since my speed plummeted to 11 that time, the free version, which edits not only the file names of my images, but also the size of the images in batches. I have it scheduled to deal with these tasks over time, as the free version has a limited amount it can carry out over a month. It stops a certain task when it has reached capacity and resumes when the month moves on to the next month and so on. I already use an app for Android called LIT to minimise the file size of my pics before I upload them but this app trims any extra off. I am not sure how far I should go with the sizing though. It is possible I could go smaller...
One issue I have with this app is that since I have been using it I notice that some of my product images or collection images have rotated which is a little annoying but not too many to stop me using the app. Sometimes I really wish I was more tech minded.
What I Intend on Doing to Have a Faster Website
I intend to tackle more of my collections and perhaps limit some of the imagery for the products to just 3 every time to reduce the images on the website altogether.
I also noticed that I have some residual java script left over from deleted apps which will help too I believe. I just need more time to figure out how to get rid of it!!!!
Keep you eyes on this blog for further updates on this topic.
Thanks for reading, Amanda
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