Client Overview
Masterpiece Jewellery is an online store specializing in high-quality, impeccably crafted Australian opals, jewelry, and gemstones. The website features a visually rich design with numerous high-resolution images and a video banner, contributing to a long homepage. Despite its recent update to the Symmetry theme version 7.2.1, the site experienced significant speed issues, negatively impacting user experience and potentially affecting sales.
Challenges
- Heavy Image and Video Content: The website contained numerous large images and a video banner, which significantly slowed down the loading speed.
- Long Homepage: The extensive content on the homepage further contributed to the sluggish performance.
- Theme Limitations: Despite the update to the latest version of the Symmetry theme, the site still suffered from poor speed performance.
Initial Speed Metrics
- Mobile Loading Speed: 7.72 seconds (Poor)
- Desktop Loading Speed: 2.63 seconds (Moderate)
- Interactivity: 120 ms (Good)
- Visual Stability: 0 (Good)
Steps to Optimize Speed
- Speed Assessment:
- We used Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix to identify key areas for improvement.
- These tools provided a detailed analysis of the loading times, highlighting the impact of images, videos, and scripts.
- Image Optimization:
- Lazy Loading: Implemented lazy loading for images to ensure that images only load when they are in the viewport.
- Compression: Used tools to compress images without compromising quality, reducing file sizes significantly.
- Format Conversion: Converted images to modern formats like WebP, which offer better compression rates.
- Video Optimization:
- Deferred Loading: Deferred the loading of the video banner until the rest of the page content had loaded.
- Alternative Formats: Used lighter video formats and optimized video settings for web delivery.
- Script Management:
- Minification: Minified CSS and JavaScript files to reduce their size.
- Asynchronous Loading: Changed the way scripts were loaded, prioritizing critical scripts and deferring non-essential ones.
- Removing Unused Scripts: Identified and removed any unused or redundant scripts.
- Theme Customization:
- Customized the Symmetry theme to address its inherent speed limitations.
- Made code adjustments to streamline theme performance, ensuring that the theme’s design features did not hinder speed.
Results
After implementing these optimizations, we achieved a remarkable reduction in the loading time:
- Mobile Loading Speed: Improved by 5 seconds, resulting in a much faster and more user-friendly experience.
- Desktop Loading Speed: Also saw significant improvement, further enhancing overall site performance.
Conclusion: By addressing the specific speed-related issues through a combination of image and video optimization, script management, and theme customization, we significantly enhanced the loading speed of Masterpiece Jewellery’s website. These improvements not only improved user experience but also contributed to better SEO rankings and potentially higher conversion rates. This case study underscores the importance of regular performance audits and optimizations to maintain a high-performing eCommerce site on Shopify.
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