If you are a Shopify user, you can see that the speed of this ecommerce platform is already high. It also has slim and optimized themes and powerful online store infrastructure. However, the Shopify team is always trying to find out the ways to make Shopify even faster and improve its users’ experience.
Therefore, Shopify has two new upgrades that bring a faster-using experience for its users. Before we deep into these two new improvements, we will give you a general understanding of Shopify.
About Shopify
Shopify, founded in Ottawa in 2004, a well-known e-commerce platform. The platform provides merchants with cloud and software solutions to turn their ideas into a real business. With Shopify users also can easily design, set up, and manage their store across multiple sales channels, including mobile, web, social media, marketplaces, brick-and-mortar locations, and pop-up shops. Shopify exists to help merchants every step to build their business from payment to shipping. Moreover, it is designed to adapt to all sizes of business. Therefore, Shopify has become a reliable partner for more than 800,000 businesses in about 175 countries, including giant enterprises such as Unilever, Kylie Cosmetics, Allbirds, MVMT, and many more.
Two New Improvements of Shopify
Recently, Shopify has introduced two big infrastructure upgrades that have been automatically enabled for all online stores. The first one is an improvement to their network infrastructure, which expanded the points of presence from 2 to 130 nodes across 80 countries. So what does this improvement bring to Shopify merchants? This upgrade helps Shopify to reduced the time it takes users to access Shopify servers. The next improvement is image support. Shopify has added automatic support for the highly optimized WebP image format to online stores.
Normally, using these features costs cost thousands of dollars a month because you have to purchase them through third-party services. But now, they’re included at no additional cost for all Shopify subscriptions.
A Faster Global Network
Usually, it takes your customer’s browser many steps to access your online store. The first step you have to do is establishing a network connection with Shopify and then finding the best network route to your server. After that you have to download the page they’re visiting. Of course, if it takes a long time to establish this connection and route the request, your customers will feel inconvenience and leave your site. In addition, they leave with the wonder that whether your website is working or not, and there will be a high chance that they will leave your store.
As we mention above that Shopify has upgraded its global network to 180 points of presence across 80 countries to handle the routing of all connections to Shopify. This new upgrade will reduce request times by up to 39%, Shopify says in its blog. Then, you can bring a faster experience for your shoppers. Up to now, the company has seen the most notable improvements in international markets like Australia, Japan, India, and Singapore.
Lightweight Image Files Built for Higher Speed
Once your customers establish a connection with Shopify, their browser begins to download all of the necessary assets to display your store. Among these assets, there is a thing that is the most important thing that you have to care about, which is images. This visual tool has a strong impact on your customers. The faster a customer sees your product photography, the faster your photos can help visually sell your products and answer potential questions.
We all know that the best way to reduce the time it takes for images to display is to decrease the amount of data that needs to be downloaded. Therefore, Shopify has managed to dramatically reduce the file size for all images hosted on Shopify with WebP. This means your online stores now automatically serve WebP images, which are up to 30% smaller than traditional image formats like .jpg and .png, to all supported browsers.
Final Thoughts
The competition in today’s ecommerce world is extremely fierce. And site speed is a competitive advantage that directly influences your conversion rates, which help you to survive and grow. This is the reason that Shopify is trying to help your business succeed with immersive and lightning-fast online stores.
If you want to further optimize the performance of your store, contact a Shopify Expert for recommendations that are tailored to your unique business and market.
Have Shopify stores? Check out the best Shopify Apps to increase sales.