You may have already heard a rumor about the performance of Shopify sites. It would not necessarily be as different as other e-commerce solutions and this could have an impact on the business.
Additionally, some sites Shopify do not report very good results on tools like Gtmetrix. So, Gtmetrics specific penalty for Shopify sites? Unsuitable or misconfigured themes? Defect inherent in e-commerce solutions in SaaS? Ou simple mythe anti-shopify ?
Let's see together if Shopify e-commerce sites can be fast and efficient and if this can be felt on Gtmetrix.
What about the technical speed of Shopify?
Before testing, let's see together how Shopify is technically structured. When you create a shopify merchant site, it will be hosted at Google Cloud. This is totally transparent for you, Shopify takes care of everything.
Note that the host may/may change in the future without Shopify notifying you. Either way, it will be uninterrupted and transparent to you. You don't have to worry about it.
Google Cloud performance
Before analyzing Shopify, we must therefore take a look at Google Cloud, Google's hosting solution. We can assume that it is efficient given the reputation and work of Google on the speed of the web. But we are here to get numbers. So . What about Google Cloud performance?
Testing the performance of a cloud service like Google is an exercise in cloud and hosting professionals, which we are not, so we will rely on the 2020 report from cockroachlabs which compared the 3 largest cloud services. cloud on e-commerce type performance and here are the results [Source] :
[Original anglais] We test workload performance by using TPC-C, a popular OLTP benchmark tool that simulates an e-commerce business.
[Pikka's translation] We tested the performance of the workload using TPC-C, a popular OLTP benchmark tool that simulates an e-commerce business.
The performance of Google Cloud on the tests is therefore a reality even if Azure, the competitor is a little ahead. But the point of this article isn't to find out if Azure is better than GCP, the point is to find out if Shopify sites can perform. And a priori the technical platform is holding up.
Now, let's see what Shopify has done with this technical base, the software part being at least as important in web performance.
Shopify and web performance
A few weeks ago, Shopify offered an average Shopify speed dashboard. By offering a "Storefront response Time" and an "Admin Response Time", we could see the average performance of the shops. The graph has disappeared from the Status page and, even if other information has been added there, it's a shame not to have the exact figure anymore.
But with more than 99.9% uptime and load peaks during black friday and out-out sales happening without problems and slowdowns, we can imagine that the solution is solid.
Theme performance
While we can't tweak the technical side of Shopify for raw server performance, it is possible to tweak themes. And as much to tell you right away, some theme developers do not take web performance seriously.
Free Shopify Themes are good basics but watch out for modifications!
By adding scripts, external css, unnecessary apps, it is possible to overload a Shopify theme and get very poor performance.
The good news is that the opposite is possible! Here is for example the performance of the Shopify site Pikka.fr on Gtmetrix.
There are still a few things to fix but overall it's quite efficient: few images, few css, optimized images, limited external calls, clean and fast code.
On the other hand, not all agencies are equal on the subject, here is a screenshot of a competitor who obviously does not have web performance in mind.
We won't name a name because the image is just to show that in the end, it's the quality of the theme that will make a big part of the performance of a Shopify site!
Ah and yes on Gtmetrix, you have to look at the scores and the percentages rather than the loading time itself. For this time to be reliable, it would be necessary to do a hundred different tests in order to have a consistent average. We will talk about the average and the statistics in a future article.
Conclusion on Shopify web performance
Choosing Shopify does not mean giving up web performance and a fast site, quite the contrary. But in the end, as on every platform, it's the quality of your e-commerce agency's service that can make the difference.
