A Better PageSpeed Report for Shopify
PageSpeed Insights is undeniably the standard tool for measuring the speed of any website. But for both Shopify merchants and speed experts it’s frustrating and worse, misleading, as a way to find opportunities to speed up your shop and to implement them.
The biggest issue comes from one of PageSpeed Insights’ greatest strengths: you can use it on any website on the internet. This means that the advice it gives is general advice that needs to support everything from huge online retailers to tiny blogs to web apps and more. It is oblivious to the Shopify platform and what can and should be done there. Implementing some advice can break your Shopify store or is just not possible on Shopify.
When it comes to files, PageSpeed treats it as if all JavaScript, CSS and images are 100% under your control and are from the same source. In reality they can come from several different parts of your shop and from apps in your theme or externally hosted.
All of this means that it’s really difficult to answer basic questions like what’s the most important thing to do to improve your speed and how do you do it. We built a tool to tell you exactly that.
Our Free, Better Than PageSpeed Insights Shopify-Specific Speed Test
We took the best parts of PageSpeed Insights and blended in our extensive Shopify speed optimization knowledge to build our free Shopify-specific speed test.
Let’s break it down to see what’s included.
Everything Is Grouped By App Or Shopify Feature = No More Scattered, Vague Filenames
With PageSpeed Insights you’re just given a bunch of URLs in the details without any visibility of which app or feature those URLs come from.
Instead, in the Plug in Useful Speed Test you’ll see exactly which app or feature is impacting your speed.
Behind the scenes we are grouping all of the relevant JavaScript, CSS and images together, identifying who ‘owns’ it and showing this as one clear line in the speed report.
This is much more clear and understandable than a huge list of long and complex URLs from PageSpeed Insights.
See The Actual Impact A Specific App Or Shopify Feature Is Having On Your Speed
The powerful grouping that we do in our report allows us to show you the actual impact an app or Shopify feature is having on your speed.
Grouped into High, Medium and Low impact, this lets you make decisions on which apps to keep/delete and how best to tackle your speed. Should you work on optimizing your images, hiring a developer to implement lazy loading or simply delete a few apps- all of this is clear in our speed report.
High impact items will definitely improve your speed. Medium items have a chance of improving your speed. Low impact items will have no strong impact on improving your speed.
Clear Shopify-Specific Summary About What Each Item Means And How To Optimize
PageSpeed Insights gives you a bunch of developer jargon about what the items are about and nothing in the way of step-by-step guidance on how to optimize your speed. We can do better.
Last but not least is our ‘summary’ section. Here you’ll find explanations of each item in the speed report, links to more information and what to do to optimize.
Simple And Effective Page Speed Report For Shopify
We’ve put a lot of work into making our speed report simple and clear, making it understandable and actionable for you. Use it and you’ll know exactly what you need to do to speed up your Shopify store.
For now the report is free, but since every one is compiled by a speed expert we may charge in future for this valuable resource.
Originally published at https://www.pluginuseful.com on May 13, 2019.
