Is a Shopify speed score of 27 bad?

Mainly this arises because somewhere you've heard that bad site-speed hurts SEO rankings. It's important to keep in mind though, that speed is not a primary ranking factor! Site relevance is still the number one key-metric that determines your search engine rankings.

Site speed is also tied to your store's overall conversion rate. Looking at the image below we see that even a 0.9 sec decrease in load time can lead to a 24% increase in conversion rate. 

(image: https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/performance/more/website-performance-conversion-rates/)

If an e-commerce site generates $10 million in sales annually, and if the conversion rate increases by 2% after the website's load time improves by a second (as in Walmart's case study), that's a $200,000 increase in revenue.

What makes up your speed score?

Shopify's speed test is based on LightHouse.

You can run your own tests with Pagespeed insights (also based on LightHouse).

Actually, the suggestions you get there are quite good already,
but if you need further input you could also use the test from GT-Metrix

Other than that the most important things to remember in terms of speed optimization are:

1. Keep calm and trust what the developer is saying about your speed score.

2. Reevaluate your Shopify Apps

• Backend vs Frontend - backend apps generally don't affect site speed. Frontend apps most times do.
• Unused apps - these should be removed immediately. 
• Semi-useful Apps - in some situations the app could be reduced in size or built into the site to increase loading speed.
• Script execution time - if an app has a large script load time like Yotpo or a page builder you may want to reconsider. If you're using Yotpo I'd recommend transferring to Okendo as they have half the code load size. If you're using a landing page builder like Shogun or Pagefly, I'd recommend testing Unbouce as it is a headless platform requiring no integration with Shopify. Also < 1 sec load time.

3. Images

• Make sure image are:
• Properly sized before uploading
• Not too heavy in file size
• Lazy loading enabled

Here are some additional tips you can put into practice:

https://www.semrush.com/blog/9-tips-for-boosting-the-speed-of-your-shopify-website/

To quickly recap:

• Manage your expectations
• Test the speed score 3 times to get a solid average score
• The speed score is made up of your homepage, collection and product page
• If the file shows a score close to 300 and under that's ok to keep as long as it's useful
• You should expect a climb of 5-15 points from optimizing your site speed
• Apps
• Carefully consider your front end apps
• Lots of javascript will slow down your load speed
• If app not being used remove
• Images
• Scale down image before uploading
• Lazy load BTF images

If you're looking to optimize your Shopify site speed setup a discovery connect with me here.