Top Shopify Failure Trends of 2021
While eCommerce is still trending up, as the effects of CVOID-19 have made a significant shift to online shopping, more and more retailers are opting in to Shopify as a fast and reliable way to setup shop online.
Ever since COVID-19, Shopify has been in hyper growth mode and while it is a great solution for anyone who is starting up, there are still woes and issues that can arise and that every Shopify merchant should be aware of.
Here at Webeyez we have a direct out-of-the-box integration with Shopify and since our app is actively monitoring hundreds of Shopify+ stores, we have a unique position in the eCommerce realm to show you what’s impacting Shopify store’s performance as a whole.
- Poorly designed Shopify themes – The Shopify themes out of the box are highly optimized and use minified css and js files so you can be sure that they would load fast on the page. However, some themes can come highly inflated out of the box, and as you customize it for your needs you will be battling an uphill battel. On way to look and judge what’s the right lightweight Shopify Theme for you is to login the benchmarked FCP Score (First Contentful Paint) and TTI Score (Time to Interactive). Another trend we are seeing in this are themes that are calling both mobile and desktop resources, which is also causing unneeded resources loaded onto the user’s session.
- Large Image size – If you have a custom theme in place you need to be careful make sure that the images and scripts are optimized. We here at Webeyez have seen many inflated themes especially when it comes to optimized images and video files on the homepage and category pages. The ongoing trends especially in fashion to show an alternate image on the category pages has given rise of very large images that are distorted for one and also very heavy on the page load. Differ offscreen images – One way of getting a higher FCP and TTI scores is by lazy loading the images onto the screen.
- Large Video files – While you can rely on Shopify to optimize your images. However, videos are a different story and the heavy weight of optimizing video files should be prior to loading them onto Shopify. We’ve seen merchants load mp4 video files of 12MB! Causing a huge latency.
- Large amount of third party Shopify Apps – While Shopify apps are an easy way to add functionality to your store, it does come with some trade-offs, as we are seeing these third-party scripts as the number one impact on a Shopify’s site speed. The more Shopify apps you add the worse your speed will become.
Here are some popular third-party scripts that we’ve found to have a large impact on page load:
- BounceX
- Klavio
- Yotpo
- HotJar
- Lucky Orange
Third party apps that have a direct impact on the DOM like overlays and chats are the apps that will have the most impact on your Shopify store. We are seeing a trend now of removing chats all together from the many Shopify stores partially because of this reason. As well as changes in consumer behavior.
Utilize Google Tag Manger to the fullest
Many Shopify+ stores are utilizing Google Tag Manger which is great, but still many Shopify stores still see scripts not called from GTM. Be sure to move all of your tracking tags like Facebook pixel, Google Analytics, Pinterest pixel to be called from GTM asynchronously. (Only available for Shopify+ merchants on the checkout)
5. Checkout / Place Order errors
We have been seeing fluctuations in the Shopify payment Gateway. Seems like Shopify is not taking any chances and often flagging orders that should flow through. This is having an significant impact on Shopify merchants.
To things up, Shopify is a great solution for retailers to get their products for sale online and in a hurry. However, one must be aware not to degrade their Shopify install with 3rd party plugins and custom themes that can drag down the site performance and with it the customer experience.
