So now it's time to move on to the second point about trust, which of course is ensuring that your
site loads fast.
Now, I don't think I really need to go into detail about why it's important that your store loads fast,
because we've all been on sites that are slow to load, and when they're slow to load, we leave and
we're probably never coming back.
And so in this lecture, I'm going to show you how to avoid that by easily keeping an eye on the speed
of your store.
And to do that, it is in fact really quite straightforward.
You can see that I've come here to a new section under analytics called reports, and there are many
reports here, some of which we're going to come back to later on in the course.
But the one that I want to draw your attention to right now is called web performance.
So scrolling on down through the list, you see the web performance report here.
And when I click on it, it takes me to the Web Performance report, which essentially our three main
parameters.
You have the loading speed, the interactivity and also the visual stability.
And of these three, the loading speed is probably the one that you want to keep an eye on the most,
because essentially what it's telling you is how long your store takes to load.
And you can see for me, at the moment that is 1.58 seconds.
And Shopify tells me that's good.
So what does good mean?
Well, if I put my cursor over this, you can see that good means that it's loading between 0 and 2.5
seconds, moderate 2.5 to 4, and poor greater than four.
And so your objective is to simply make sure as much as possible, that your site is loading under 2.5
seconds.
Then for the interactivity report, this is giving you an idea of how long your site takes to respond
to events, such as when a user clicks on a button.
So sometimes on sites we click on a button and nothing seems to happen.
Or it seems to take a long time and that's not a good thing.
So we want to make sure that it's responsive.
And again you can see here it's 1.2 milliseconds which is giving me a good.
So to see what that means.
Good is anything under 100 milliseconds.
And then you can see what it is for moderate and poor.
So once again you just want to make sure that you're always within the good range as much as possible.
And then finally what is visual stability?
Well, you might have noticed that sometimes when you visited sites that somehow, as they're loading,
it feels like certain elements of the site, certain parts of the site, are kind of jumping around
before it then stabilizes and presents the page.
Now, that kind of jumping around process, as I described, is essentially the visual stability, which
of course, you won't be surprised to hear.
We need to make sure it's in the good range now, because your store is hosted on the Shopify servers,
which are extremely powerful.
What you're almost certainly going to find is that the visual stability and the interactivity really
don't vary that much, and that for the most part, they're always going to be in that good range.
And there's therefore really nothing for you to do.
But the loading speed is going to vary.
So this is the one that you really want to keep an eye on.
Now, I'm not saying it's going to vary wildly, but just appreciate as you build your store and as
you make various changes, depending on what you do, will affect the loading speed of the site.
And on that subject, there are two main things to look out for.
The first one is images.
I think it's probably quite easy to imagine that a large image is going to slow down your site, so
you want to avoid large images.
And the second one is apps.
Now up to this point we've only loaded one app, which is dropshipping.
But later on in the course we are going to be adding other apps.
And it's important to understand that you always want to choose well developed apps.
And typically those are easy to find because they're the ones that have stood the test of time.
They've already been around for a few years.
They have close to a five star rating and many positive reviews.
Now, of course, on this course I'm only going to be recommending you the best apps, which should
definitely not be slowing down your store.
So in other words, the problem with apps, if you like, is very easily resolved by simply making sure
that we are using the best apps.
But what about images?
I said that we want to make sure that the images that we put on our site are not too big.
And so what does that actually mean?
Well, I draw your attention to this blog entry, which you can see is shopify.com/uk/blog/image hyphen
sizes.
And you can see also that the title is a website image size guidelines for 2024.
Now I strongly suggest that you have a look at this article.
But just in the interest of time, if I scroll down through this various text here, you can see that
for every image type it's recommending dimensions.
So for example, the hero image that we loaded onto the store several lectures ago should have a recommended
size of 1280 by 720 pixels.
And then if I scroll down a little bit further and find the hero image title.
So just going down a little bit more, here we go.
Hero images.
It then goes into a bit more.
More detail where you can see that the recommended file size is ten megabytes.
So in other words, the recommended image sizes are very well defined.
So you really have no excuse.
But I can promise you that from time to time you might load images by mistake that do affect the speed
of your store.
Now for each of these three metrics loading speed, interactivity and visual stability.
There is a more detailed report.
And because the loading speed is almost certainly the most important, that's the one I'm going to show
you now.
And in order to see it, all you need to do is to actually click on the title, and it's going to load
a more detailed report that shows you the actual loading speed over time.
And by default, it shows me the last 30 days.
But I can also look at the last seven days or even up to the last 90.
So you can see that it's varying and you can also see the good limit.
And for the most part, I'm below that.
I'm within the good zone.
Now, I also want to draw your attention to these little markers here where you see five, one and six.
So what are these?
Well, these are events or in other words, things that you did on your store that might have affected
the loading speed.
For example, loading a really large image.
Now in my case you can see that for example with number five it hasn't really affected the loading speed.
If anything, after it, it went down for number one, it's more or less stable.
And for number six it kind of went down as well.
But if your store starts to slow down, you can come to this report, put your mouse over the marker,
and it's going to tell you exactly what you did at that point in time that may have caused the site
to slow down.
So just for completeness, if I put my cursor over the six here, you can see here that the event involved
me editing the Dawn theme, which as I said, didn't have any impact really on store speed.
But instead of that, you might see something like image upload or app added things that will trigger
you to help you understand what you did that caused the problem, and then you can go back and fix it.
So there we go.
A really fantastic built in tool that allows you to easily keep an eye on how well your store is performing.
Now, having said all that, the problem is we tend to get very busy with other things and we may therefore
forget to come back and check this report.
So what I suggest you do is in your calendar, you make a note to check this report on a weekly basis.
After all, it's only going to take you a few seconds, but also and just to help you out a bit, if
you go down to the online store and themes, which you've probably come to realize by now is a page
that we visit regularly, because of course, it's from here that we go to the theme editor.
You can see up the top here a summary of your loading speed, your interactivity, and your visual stability.
So just get into the habit that every time you come to this page, check each of these three parameters
to make sure that they're showing good.
And if they're not, simply click into it and it'll take you straight back to the web performance report.