With the recent announcement from Google that website speed will be one of the top three ranking factors in the coming 12 months it’s no surprise that Shopify have announced two major changes to improve the speed of your online shop even further.

Having a hosted solution certainly comes with benefits, but if your provider hasn’t got your back then you will certainly start to suffer in the organic rankings over the coming months as Google implements its new criteria. WordPress websites using woocommerce on shared hosting should certainly be starting to feel a bit nervous about these changes. Moving a site to a different provider with a faster or dedicated server will certainly be worrying change. Luckily us we have the whole Shopify technical team on our side.

Firstly, a recently completed rebuild under the bonnet means that the engine that creates your shop pages, known as the ‘storefront renderer’, has had a major update. Shopify claim these changes will see improvements of between 40 to 200 percent in load times on live stores, helping conversion rates for merchants across the world.

Secondly, this summer will see the launch of a new dedicated performance dashboard allowing you to measure the speed indicators Google will be using as one of the ways to rank your store. Visibility of the impact of installing a new app or changing a page on your theme will certainly help us all to monitor changes we make and will keep app developers focused on efficient use of resources.

I for one am pleased to see these improvements, a fast store means customers stay on your online store longer and are more likely to place an order.

I will be back with more details on the performance dashboard and how to use it in your boutique as soon as it is available.