Shopify is one of the premium e-commerce platforms preferred by most online businesses. As per research by Demandsage, about 1.75 million businesses use Shopify; additionally, 7K+ applications are available in the Shopify app store in order to facilitate businesses with their site.
With the holiday season setting in, competition is only increasing! Brands are streamlining the rough edges on their platform, ensuring that their page speed is right, and leaving no stone unturned to ensure that their site dominates the Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).
So what Shopify hacks can be adopted to optimize your site performance?
Ensure Optimal Speed
First and foremost, brands need to ensure that their site loads in less than 2 to 3 seconds. Nothing is more infuriating to a shopper’s user experience than a website or app which takes about an eternity to load!
Here’s a handy video which shares end-to-end guidance to help you optimize your Shopify site’s page speed:
As a rule of thumb, here are few must do things to follow:
- Optimize third-party apps and plugins
- Use Google Tag Manager for tracking
- Reduce the number of redirects and broken links
Optimizing site speed is a surefire way to create a great user experience. In an age of time economy, users don’t have the time or patience to wait; this is especially true when they are accessing your website on the go from Mobile platforms. Ensuring your website loads quickly will help keep customers on your page and browsing your offers!
Do Away With Duplicate Content
Nothing really harms a website more than duplicate content. At times during the process of web development, your developer may unintentionally end up duplicating some pages, which may have long-standing repercussions.
Duplicate content is one of the most detrimental things often left ignored. More often than not, it is a purely unintentional mistake which may attract a penalty.
From Google’s standpoint, one shouldn’t create a new page if there is no new proposition to be added in there. Copying content from any other page of the site is absolutely discouraged, as it appears that the page is created solely for the purpose of adding more layers to the site without having any specific agenda. Remeber Google’s Helpful Content Update? Google prioritizes sites that fulfill the user’s search query and adds helpful content; duplicated content is not helpful. Once a site is penalized, it takes a lot of time and resources to get it removed.
For more details, please check out this NetElixir’s video on fixing duplicate content in Shopify platform:
Creation of Duplicate URLs
Just as it is detrimental to have duplicate content on your site, having duplicate URLs are equally damaging. Often, developers would duplicate an existing page to create a new page with different content or updated details. When this happens, Shopify names it as “Copy of {Existing Page}” and the URL slug reads https://www.example.com/copy-of-existingpage.
Though the developer can change the page’s H1 title, the URL structure would still remain unchanged and would be displayed as shown above. Hence, you would end up having two different content with same or very similar URLs.
Just as two different URLs with same content gives rise to duplicate content issue, in a similar way, two URLs with different content but the same URL also affects the site’s overall hygiene. And, in a way it sends out misinformation to search engines about the content of the site, which can negatively impact your indexing and ranking.
In order to circumvent the issue, it is important to rename the ‘copy of’ URL and simultaneously redirect the copy of the version to its new counterpart. A word of caution would be to ensure that the redirection is implemented as otherwise you would land up with multiple URLs with the same content!
How NetElixir Can Help
The Shopify hacks mentioned above are meant to help Search Engine Optimizers, Web Developers, and essentially the business adopt quick techniques to derive benefits of the platform and avoid SEO mistakes from hurting your ranking. If you need more assistance on implementing them, feel free to contact us.
