One factor that has a significant impact in e-commerce is page load time.
The faster a page loads, the better it converts and performs in SEO.
Last week, we rolled out an impactful update to Shopify’s image compression.
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We made a change to how we optimize the delivery of WebP images, reducing total delivered image bytes by ~9% and improving Largest contentful paint (LCP) by ~5%!
Results were measured with Google Lighthouse and we tested for stable image quality.
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Core Web Vitals are Google’s way of quantifying user experience and an official signal for search ranking since May 2021.
LCP = time between the page starting to load and the largest element (often hero images) becoming visible.
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Because images are often the largest element and we decreased the total number of bytes per image, this launch improves the total Core Web Vitals score.
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You can explore our image compression here: cdn.shopify.com
More updates on page load improvements coming soon.
