Shopify is a hosting environment that prides itself on making websites easy to build. It can be a great tool to leverage for online businesses and allows just about anyone to easily set up a store on their website and sell products. It’s attractive to a variety of online businesses because of its convenience and ease of use and implementation. But that convenience can also make it very difficult to deliver a top-performing website.

When reviewing the requirements necessary to achieve a top search engine ranking for your ecommerce business, it's important to understand what elements play into successful digital marketing. Site performance and the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site are essential. For obvious reasons, if your site doesn’t pull up quickly—in less than three seconds—there is little chance you’ll garner ranking on the first page of any search engine results. Making your business virtually invisible to potential customers.

Earlier this summer, Google announced that it will roll out new search updates in 2021. The shift focuses strongly on overall site performance and user page experience, but could cause many websites to lose much of their existing traffic. 

To prevent your business from becoming invisible in search, it’s important to understand what ranking factors will be part of the new focus. Making changes now will help you stay ahead of the curve—and the competition.

Page speed, sometimes also referenced as site speed or page load time, refers to how quickly your website content loads for visitors. If pages load correctly and quickly, it means your website visitors can move through your content and services effectively. However, if your page speed lags—visitors and potential customers may get stuck on pages that don’t load. Or worse, not be able to access your site content at all, forcing them to leave your site (meaning no new customers for you!).