Something has been bothering me for quite some time. Many Shopify developers are not concerned with the speed of your store. And there is the undeniable fact that slow app performance harms retail in a variety of ways.
The apps you have seen in the Shopify App Store run on their own servers. When you add an app to your storefront, your website sends a request to the app's server to load the app. This means that when someone visits your website, it is not just running on Shopify's servers but multiple servers, depending on how many apps you have on your store.
These servers are not in the same city, either. One could be in New York and the other in Sydney, Australia.
This adds up to the total loading time.
I do know, though, that apps are required for additional functionality. Apps can help you sell more. So, as a business owner, what should you do?
Let's take a look at Shopify's Online Store 2.0 (OS 2.0), which was released this year.
Speed Improvements with OS 2.0
Apps in OS 2.0 are intended to be hosted on Shopify's servers when a visitor accesses your website. Apps still have their own servers, but visitors only interact with one when they visit your site.
So my team and I settled to address the speed issue once and for all. And we made our Pasilobus apps work with OS 2.0 by building them from scratch. During our testing, we were able to reduce our app load times by as much as three milliseconds using OS 2.0.
Before OS 2.0, most apps took 300-400 milliseconds to load from a separate server. But now, we were able to achieve almost no impact in OS 2.0!
That is a huge step forward for the future of e-commerce.
Going supersonic
As a result, we're launching a new feature called Supersonic today. For more information, please click here.
When we refer to an app as a Supersonic app, it has little to no impact on your store's performance. It means that it has been thoroughly tested. It employs global edge caching to provide the best possible performance.
Supersonic allows you to install as many apps as you want without sacrificing performance.
We plan to migrate all our users to Supersonic within the next two months.
Turbo Booster
Our obsession with performance did not end there. We tried a few other ideas as well.
There are two major issues with online stores. One is the speed score (such as provided by Google Page Insights), and the other is that online stores are still multi-page applications.
The speed score issue is about optimization and having apps that work quickly enough (such as Supersonic apps). However, the issue of online stores being multi-page applications is more intriguing.
Every time a user visitor clicks a page, a call is made to the website's server, which causes a delay. And no matter how fast the store works, it does not feel fast enough.
We built Pasilobus Turbo to address this issue. Turbo uses caching and preloading to load pages quickly (If you want to talk more about this, send me an email!). Furthermore, it is compatible with OS 2.0. As a result, there is a total boost effect without any impact on store performance.
The speed of your website is essential to creating a successful online business. Choose your tools carefully, then add them one at a time while continually evaluating your store as you go.