The latest release of Shopify is OS2.0, a major upgrade to the platform. It offers a number of improvements, including theme apps and drag-and-drop options. This is an important update for the platform since many merchants have been waiting for a new store design for quite some time. However, this change does not mean that the old store design is no longer supported. Instead, it means that you can now create custom themes and landing pages with incredible site speed times.
With the new version of Shopify OS, the new editor replaces the popular Shogun page builder. This new editor allows small businesses to create a variety of page templates and populate them with data using custom blocks and sections. The update also brings a facelift to the content management system. You can now type custom content into any page and publish it across multiple channels. This means that you can have a faster site than ever before.
How does site speed affect ecommerce?
Page speed measures the time it takes the content on a URL to load. Site speed, on the other hand, represents how your site is performing overall. It’s scored by services like Google PageSpeed Insights which look at various load times on your site in aggregate.
Skilled analyzed 12 case studies that revealed customer expectations of site performance:
- 79% of customers “dissatisfied” with a site’s performance are less likely to buy from them again
- 64% of smartphone users expect a website to load in four seconds or less
- 47% of online shoppers expect web pages to load in two seconds or less
A time delay can affect sales, too. Through client experiments, web performance optimizers Crazyegg discovered that speeding up a page by just one second boosted conversions by 7%.
That means if a site makes $100,000 per day, a one-second improvement generates another $7,000 daily, and the opposite is true too. Online shoppers will never learn to be patient with slow pages.
Book a free 30-minute video call with one of our Shopify performance experts where we’ll discuss your web performance and possible optimization solutions
Best outcome: your site has great opportunity for improvement, we optimize your performance so you don’t have to worry, and you earn more happy customers.
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Slow-loading sites also negatively impact your searchability. With paid search, for example, slow landing pages lower your Google AdWords Quality Score—which means a higher cost-per-click.
Search engine optimization (SEO) experts will also tell you that slow pages hurt organic rankings across all devices.
Other site speed improvements
Online Store 2.0 is also built with a new JSON template format, which means that merchants can customize their stores without hiring a developer. This allows them to create a theme that is maintenance-friendly and fully compatible with all browsers. Moreover, the new version supports faster loading times, and the speed of the website is also increased by 35%. One of the main reasons for Shopify’s OS 2.0 upgrade is its ability to support faster sites.
Shopify OS 2.0 features a new editor and improved performance. You can now create custom storefronts, add theme extensions, and manage apps within themes. All of these improvements are made possible by the new theme editor, which runs 35% faster than Debut. In addition to this, OS 2.0 has a faster platform than Debut. And if you’re a developer, you can build your theme without worrying about the platforms and re-platforming.
New themes mean greater site speed
The new Dawn theme is built with a focus on performance and user-friendliness. The new theme also uses JSON template files, which enable developers to use generic files for other apps. This feature allows developers to upload media files from their PCs. Besides, it has the same features as the Debut theme, which is a major benefit for Shopify merchants. You can also add your own custom pages and blog posts through OS2.0.
Another important feature of Shopify OS 2.0 is its integration with themes. This allows developers to create apps that can integrate with existing themes. It also allows developers to manage supporting assets with ease, which can be very useful when implementing the new UI. It has several advantages, and is more powerful than its predecessor. The new interface is more flexible. You can customize the interface of your storefronts with it. If you’re a developer, the new OS 2.0 editor will help you to create themes that will suit your needs and make the most of it.
The new Shopify OS2.0 theme allows you to use custom Liquid code on your pages. This is similar to an HTML setting, but it gives you access to all the Liquid objects on the page. This feature is especially useful if you have a lot of custom sections. Previously, you had to modify the code of each page to make the changes to your site. With the new Shopify OS2.0 theme, you can easily define different sections on a page, so you can have an optimized site with more content.
The new OS 2.0 theme allows merchants to create customized sections and customize their homepages. The editor allows you to add custom sections to any page. The editor is also limited, but Shogun Page Builder is expected to bring exciting new features in the future. The Dawn theme is compatible with all modern browsers and is a significant improvement over the debuted theme. It also provides a cleaner interface. Although Shopify OS2.0 is not compatible with old versions of the platform, it is compatible with Shopify’s latest releases.
The new Shopify Dawn theme is designed to offer flexibility and ease of use. It’s made of HTML and CSS, and has less Javascript, which increases loading speed. It’s also faster than the Debut theme and is compatible with all browsers. Its new features are all built for a faster site. With the latest update to Shopify, the new themes, in addition to being lightweight, will continue to improve the speed of your website.
What performance gains can be expected?
On Shopify, our Storefront Renderer (SFR), is a new infrastructure upgrade that accelerates site speed. A Ruby application built from scratch, SFR is dedicated to serving storefront requests as fast as possible.
Storefront Renderer changes how read requests are served leading to server-side performance gains of 2.5 to 5 times versus the speed of requests made without SFR.
The biggest performance gains via SFR are in cache misses—those instances where a page or other requested data isn’t found in the cache memory and has to be retrieved from other cache levels or the main memory, causing delays and slowdowns.
What that means for your business is that Shopify is fast, out of the box. One of my bigger clients started using SFR sometime in 2020 and saw dramatic improvements over the previous month:
- 15% increase in revenue
- 17% increase in conversion rate
- 12% decrease in average page load
- 37.95% decrease in average server response time
- 3% decrease in bounce rate
The best part is that all stores on Shopify Plus are now powered by Storefront Renderer.
Although site speed is influenced by many moving parts, you can rest assured that Shopify is doing its part to provide the fastest infrastructure possible. If your commerce platform isn’t committed to making speed a top priority, then the rest of the suggestions that follow won’t make as big of a difference. Knowing that you have this with Shopify, you can own your site speed by working on the following items to further improve your website.”
