With Martin Michalek about the speed of e-shops on Shoptet

What effect does the choice of templates and plugins have on the speed of a website? What is the optimal ratio between attractive appearance and e-shop performance? And how to recognize a quality customization supplier?

In our interview, Martin describes the most common mistakes in detail, highlights the importance of quality implementation of design changes and presents an example of successful optimization ofDenatura.cze-shop.

You'll also learn how speed monitoring can fundamentally affect the performance of your e-shop and why communication is more important than technical details when choosing partners.

As far as Shoptet is concerned, it is itself very well prepared in terms of speed. Templates as such usually don't cause major problems. But where we often see a problem in PageSpeed.cz is the implementation of more drastic design changes.

The first problem is that clients and designers often don't realize that on a classic Shoptet, coders will have to rewrite the original template layout with large amounts of JavaScript, which is itself a complication for the performance of the e-shop. I think that already here e-shop operators should pause and have a conversation about how to choose the original template and how much to modify its appearance.

Another problem is the implementation of these changes. The quality of coders on Shoptet is very diverse, from quality people to those who froze in 2010 and commit real atrocities on templates.

Here you definitely need to judge their quality on recommendations from friends, not just on the number of stars in Shoptet's partner list. We always have a better experience with bigger suppliers like Mime Digital, Able or dkLab.

What about accessories?

Even these usually don't automatically degrade speed. I would just be careful about the INP metric, i.e. the speed of response to interactions. There we see deterioration due to various javascript add-ons. Regular GTM or Google Analytics don't have a negative impact, but you need to be wary of personalization, advertising, A/B testing add-ons or those that add address whispering to the buying process, for example.

However, it should be said that at PageSpeed.cz we work with a number of e-shops using Shoptet and despite the limitations of the platform, we have managed to handle almost everything so far. We can also use Green Core Web Vitals on Shoptet.

If I can recommend one essential thing that all e-shoppers should do regarding speed, it is site speed monitoring. I'll say more about that later.

We optimized the speed for about 10-15 sites on Shoptet. Right now we are preparing a case study for Denatura.cz.

On Denature, we first optimized the layout stability(CLS) and load speed(LCP)metrics, both very successfully.

By the time Google came out with a new INP metric to measure interaction speed, we set about optimizing it. We've had partial success with optimizing JavaScript directly on the Denature site, but over time we came to the point where we needed to connect directly with Shoptet.

Our collaboration with Shoptet's developers then resulted in improved INP for all of the e-stores, a green ranking for most of them in the Core Web Vitals rankings, and likely better SEO rankings.

We hope to continue this collaboration, because the impact of speed optimization on 40 thousand e-shops is huge and PageSpeed.cz 's mission is to make websites faster for everyone. We don't have numbers for Denatura yet, but I think speed optimization has contributed to their big year-over-year growth. I think all three parties can be happy.

As I wrote above. I would choose bigger studios and avoid cheap freelance coders. It may surprise you, but it's not necessary to focus on the technical expertise of the person or company.

Communication is key. Very often we find that optimization doesn't run as we would like, just because of the lack of communication between developers.

Choose people who communicate, are helpful and proactive. You'll see this early in the development process.

As a Shoptet e-commerce store operator, you should always strive for green Core Web Vitals metrics at the domain-wide level. Green is a sign that everything is at least basically in order.

The next goal is then to see green values in Google Search Console for all URL groups. These two resources need to be combined.

The following figure then shows what values are considered optimal for each metric.

What values do sites on Shoptet have? In our monitoring we keep track of some of them and it looks like this:

What can an e-shop owner do himself to improve speed, even without technical knowledge? What are the first steps to optimization?

There is surprisingly a lot, mostly at the level of "soft" knowledge.

I'll answer straight away in the form of a checklist:

1. Measure site speed. One-off tests using PageSpeed Insights aren't that good, which is why we came up with PLUS monitoring, which tracks metrics values from Google, but also runs synthetic tests of your important pages every day. It's true that even a minor change like adding an add-on can break your speed, so monitoring is key. Monitoring is also used to check coders and other vendors.
2. Choose a good web editing contractor. Look for verified, well-communicating partners with quality references. See previous answers. But still check his work with monitoring.
3. Consider each deployment of a new javascript component. Again, see above. It's not bad to deploy anything new to the site, but make sure you measure and therefore know when a new component breaks any of your speed metrics.
4. Stay in touch with Shoptet support. Ask them to make saving images to the WebP format, which is significantly more data efficient.

If speed doesn't improve, hire a pro.

At PageSpeed.cz, we can deliver results in just a few hours of consulting.