WHY SHOPIFY'S PAGE SPEED TEST IS BULL**KS

E-commerce has witnessed a boom in activity and new customers for the past several years. Thanks to the pandemic, the industry has grown even further. Many firms were forced to shut down their physical shops and place their employees on leave for safety reasons.

Shopping online has become a necessity for some clients, mainly if they belong to at-risk groups. They, like your company's employees, must maintain their health. Despite this, consumers require food, cleaning supplies, and shelter.

Shopify is among the leading e-commerce platforms that we have today. Many business owners are reaping big by optimizing the use of their online platform. Several businesses have increased their sales, hence increasing revenues thanks to this platform.

However, there are measures that traders on Shopify often take to boost their conversion rates. One good example is striving for a great page speed. Recently, Shopify added a tool that shows web page speeds on the dashboard. This action has even made traders on Shopify focus more effort on a high page speed.

However, there is a serious question that every trader needs to ask. What is the significance of your page speed? Or better still, how does your business benefit by attaining a certain page speed?  

How to Measure your Shopify Page Speed

Analysis software aids in the identification of optimization challenges and opportunities. They crawl your website and return warnings and recommendations based on algorithms and a predetermined score system.

Here are a few examples of the most common tools:

• Shopify Analyzer
• Google PageSpeed Insights ( PSI), also known as Lighthouse
• GTmetrix
• Pingdom
• WebPageTest.org ( WPT)

The Significance of Shopify Page Speed

It's self-evident that a slow website results in a poor user experience.

The following essential metrics have been thought to be affected by site speed:

• Rate of conversion
• Rankings in search engines
• Revenue  
• Engagement

The other metrics might, for sure, be affected by site speed. However, it is vitally important to note that low-performance scores in Lighthouse (which is the top-recommended analysis tool for measuring core web vitals and other performance metrics) do not directly impact SEO. This is according to Google's John Muller. This means that your high-speed page score does not directly impact your site's SEO ranking.

This is the case since Google does not use Lighthouse scores reached using lab data but data gathered from real visitors in the field.

Why you Should Ignore the Shopify Speed Score

It would help if you focused on other essential aspects of your business other than striving to increase your site speed score.

• Google's Lighthouse Performance Score is the foundation for Shopify's Speed Score. You would assume that a Google score would be worth paying attention to. In this case, however, it is not the case. The Lighthouse Score is highly technical and has numerous potentially significant recommendations. However, the majority of the suggestions are outside your control. Shopify, your theme developer, or app developers could all follow these suggestions. However, there is not much that store owners can do to change the technical suggestions.

• The idea of a score is misleading. When you consider something that receives such a high score, one believes that a perfect score is conceivable. So, if you look at the Lighthouse scores of the top 10 most visited websites, Wikipedia, Instagram, and Yahoo! are among the sites. The average score for the top ten websites is 59. Google search receives a score of 84, whereas YouTube, which Google owns, gets a score of 45. Only Wikipedia receives a score of 85 or higher. As a result, by putting this score on a 100-point scale, we might be led to believe that most websites are failing.

• In the Shopify admin, the relevant comparison does not appear to be accurate. A good example is when you look at random 60 web page scores, you will find nine as the lowest and 58 as the highest. The low and high might even be, ironically, two separate stores operated by the same firm. The average score is 28, with most stores scoring between 14 and 32. All of these are now fully operational, revenue-generating stores. 

• Ecommerce success is not determined by speed score. There's a lot of talk on the internet about how even a fraction of a second of improved performance can result in substantial revenue increases. However, this does not appear to be the case. Because income figures are not available, let's start with the top 10 Shopify stores by traffic. On average, these establishments have a Lighthouse speed of 18.

The Useful Ways to Measure Your Site's Performance 

We have established above that page speed is not an appropriate metric to evaluate the site performance. The following are some of the best ways to determine your site's performance.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate of your store is the first metric to consider. Now, the conversion rate is not used to determine the speed or size of a page. However, it does track how your customers react to your website. If you add functionality to your store that reduces the speed score but increases the conversion rate, then your speed score may be reduced, but you are doing the right things.

Landing page speed

It's also worth noting that page speed is more significant on landing pages than on the third or fourth-page view of a customer's experience.

A quick landing page informs the customer that they have arrived at a live, functional website.

Use landing pages sparingly if you have slow-loading sites in your purchasing experience, such as the automobile configurator.

Also, consider including a loading graphic, which informs customers that something is occurring and that they will need to wait a few moments.

If your landing page speed is less than 3 seconds, move on and focus on other business priorities. But if your page takes more than 3 seconds, dig deeper, for that is a problem.