When you're building an eCommerce site for a client there are going to be all manner of design considerations that will need addressing. But when it comes to the bottom line, the key factor is going to be speed: how quickly your pages load, and how smooth and seamless the journey to a completed sale is. That's why you need to be using Shopify.
The Shopify platform is built with speed in mind, because time and again research has shown that customers hate to wait when they're shopping online, and it only takes a few seconds of delay for them to decide to look elsewhere. Google's mobile pages speed study has found that every extra second a page takes to load drastically increases your bounce rate, while web performance experts Crazyegg say that speeding up a page by one second can boost conversions by 7 per cent.
Slow-loading sites can hurt your clients in other ways, too. Google doesn't look kindly upon sites that take too long to load, and if your client's store is struggling then this can hurt its searchability and damage organic rankings. Basically, you need to be building stores that deliver on speed and give everyone what they need, instantly.
All the speed you need
With Shopify as your platform, you get just that. It takes all the guesswork out of building a store and provides you with a fast and reliable platform that never keeps customers waiting, and that can easily keep pace as your clients' reach expands. There's no danger of a store getting hammered by a sudden influx of customers.
When you a build a store with Shopify, it takes care of the hosting. Shopify has a track record of 99.99% uptime so you'll never have to worry about unexpected drop-outs, and its world-class CDN powered by Fastly ensures that any store hosted on Shopify will load almost instantaneously anywhere in the world.
There's more to Shopify's speed than bulletproof hosting and delivery, though. With Shopify's Storefront Renderer (SFR) you'll see an instant boost in page load times. SFR is a custom Ruby application that changes how read requests are served, giving you performance increases of between 2.5 and 5 times the speed that non-SFR pages would deliver.
And to save customers from delays at the checkout, Shop Pay – Shopify’s accelerated checkout available to all Shopify merchants for free – eases the payment process by enabling customers to save their payment, shipping and billing information for faster transactions when they return to your store. Shopify has found that by speeding up the checkout process, Shop Pay can increase conversions by 18% (and lift mobile conversion rates up to 11% higher than any other checkout method) while helping stores to build lasting relationships with customers.
Become a Shopify partner
With Shopify as your go-to eCommerce platform you're guaranteeing your clients a fast and reliable online store that'll bring them higher conversions and keep customers coming back for more. And by joining the Shopify Partner Program for free you'll be able to boost your own business as well.
As a member of the Shopify Partner Program you can generate monthly revenue by referring clients to Shopify and publishing your own themes and apps on the Shopify Theme Store and App Store, and there are further benefits, too. You'll have access to free training courses, documentation and other resources to help you strengthen your Shopify skills – you'll also be the first to learn about upcoming features, while priority Partner support means you and your clients can quickly get any help you might need. Partners also receive discounts on software and services that can help at every stage in the development process.
To find out more about the Shopify Partner Program and how it can help you build speedy online stores that your clients will love, head here (opens in new tab).
