Speed Up Shopify Store by Resizing Product Images

It is important to know how to speed up your Shopify store because this can increase your conversion rate. If your Shopify store loads slowly, customers are more likely to leave your store without purchasing so Shopify speed optimization is crucial.

When you run the Shopify page speed optimization tool though you may get a lot of items recommended to change that you can't really control because they are needed for your Shopify theme to work correctly or they are related to the apps you are using on your site.

On thing you can do to speed up Shopify site load time though is to resize your product images to the best image size. In this video we will show you how to resize product images in Shopify using the Shopify image editor. We will use Shopify's free online image resizer to easily resize product images plus talk about the best image size to use for your Shopify store.

View the Full Video Transcript Below

When it comes to online shopping, how fast your site loads is super, super important, and it can mean the difference of a sale or someone instantly leaving your site. So in today's Shopify Quick Tips video, we are going to go over how to speed up your site pretty easily.

So we've all had that experience before where we go to a shop, whether on our desktop or our phone, and it loads really, really slow. And the images are like slowly loading in no matter how good of an internet connection you have.

And you just leave because you don't want to sit there and wait for the whole page to load.

This happens a lot and people are losing sales on their e-commerce store because of it. So you can actually see how your site is performing in terms of page speed inside your Shopify store backend.

So to see how your site is performing, you'll just go to "Online Store" and "Themes" and you'll see that underneath your published theme, you can see there, your speed score and how it compares to others in your industry, as well as click to learn more about your page speed.

This is pulling in information from Google's page speed tool, and it gives you a lot of detailed information about your homepage, collection page and product page, and how quickly that they're loading. And it gives you a score for each of these areas. This way you can see where improvements need to be made.

Now, I will say that a lot of the things that it suggests just aren't always possible to do, and this could be based on the theme that you were using for your Shopify store. A lot of themes have code that are in the actual theme itself to make different functionality things on the site work.

As well as every time you add in an app from the Shopify app store, that's adding even more code into your theme. And so while the functionality of the app is nice, it can start to really bog down your site load time.

So anytime you're adding in a new Shopify app, make sure that it's something that you actually really need. And I also recommend every few months just going through your Shopify app lists and making sure that you're using everything fully and that you're still wanting to use that app.

Otherwise maybe just remove the app and the code from your theme. This will help speed up your theme overall. But again, it's a little bit less in your control if you need that app for different functionality or you need the functionality that your site theme is providing you, you can't really change a lot there, but one of the things that you can change is your image sizing.

A lot of times when I'm going in to review different Shopify stores, I see that their images are just too big. And so the server is having to show these huge images, especially on mobile devices. And it's just taking really long to show that image.

So you can actually go in and resize these images directly inside of Shopify. So to do this, you'll go to a product that you want to resize the image of and you'll actually first upload the image to Shopify then you'll click to open it there.

Then you'll see in the bottom left-hand corner, you have a couple of different options. You can crop the image, you can draw on the image and you can also resize the image there.

So if your site uses zoom in techniques where you're actually able to kind of hover over the image and zoom in, when you're on the product page, then I recommend going with the size of 2048 pixels. This would be for a square image, but I'd say still good quality image size. It's going to have a good zoom capability without being a huge file size.

And if you don't have zoom in technology on your site, then I recommend going with about half of that for image size. So 1024 pixels, again, this is still going to be a nice high quality image for your site, but it's not going to just be this monster image that is really heavy on your site to load and slow down your site speed.

Now that's for product images. Any other images that you have on your site, like your page images or your homepage images, you would need to resize those before bringing them into Shopify. And that's going to really depend on the image size that you need based on the theme that you're using.

So look through your theme information there in terms of the size that is recommended for different areas like your homepage slideshow, and then you can use external tools like Adobe Photoshop or Canva.com, which is a free online tool. You can resize the images there and save them out.

That way you're making sure that you're adding in the correctly sized images for each area of your site. Once you go through and you resize these different images, you're going to have faster loading times for the pages and you're going to have happier customers.

Hopefully also maybe see an increase in sales, especially on mobile too. So I hope you found this Shopify Quick Tips video helpful. If you did, we have more videos like this coming out every Tuesday, all about Shopify.

So make sure to check out the full Quick Tips video playlist over here and click that subscribe button if you haven't yet to subscribe to this channel. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.