Migrating to Shopify 2.0 : A Case Study On How We Overcame Google's Penalization & Improved Our Core Web Vitals

Our company, eComIntegrate, is a US-based digital marketing agency that provides customized website optimization and SEO services to help eCommerce businesses build an online presence. 

When beginning an eCommerce business, every business owner needs a website that successfully conveys their brand and helps customers interact with the business seamlessly. Custom Shopify website optimization service is one of the staples of our website improvement services.

While scaling up a business, we always provide our clients with services that are unique to their business objectives and goals. Anyone familiar with the world of digital marketing will tell you that the rules are constantly changing. While catering towards our clients’ unique needs is an effortless part of our business plan, we often have trouble conveying to our clients the importance of new strategies in website optimization and SEO. The ever-changing landscape of our marketing world may be to blame.

We decided there’s no better way to exemplify what we can do for our clients than doing it to our own website. Follow our journey through navigating Google’s ranking shift, our poor performance, and how we were able to fix it.

Challenge - Improving the Core Web Vitals

Technology and eCommerce are ever-evolving. Requirements change, algorithms update, and we all must try our hardest to keep up. Being a custom Shopify website service provider, we wanted to give our clients a better eCommerce journey and improve our website performance alongside our own clients.

While aiming to scale up our site and business, the old Shopify-supported website put constraints on us from the beginning. Immediately we ran into the issue of aligning to Google’s new ranking algorithm.

When Google changed its ranking algorithm in 2021, it chose to make first-load page performance, mobile-friendliness, security, and safety the core metrics. We began experiencing a ranking drop in 2021, the reason being that our website was not performing by the standards of Google’s modified Core Web Vitals.

The Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP, is the amount of time it takes for the largest piece of web page content to display on your screen. Our LCP performance was too low on mobile, and the First Input Delay (FID), or website responsiveness, was also poor compared to other websites. 

Paying our focus to Google's Core Web Vitals became cumbersome while we were relying on the older, more out-of-date Shopify platform. We needed an advanced platform that could handle the changes we were hoping to make.

Read More about Google Core Web Vitals  

Google Core Web Vitals for Shopify Store: Everything You Must Know

Solution: Shopify To Shopify 2.0

With an aim to provide the greatest customer experience for our site visitors and to raise our site's ore web vitals, we opted to migrate over to Shopify 2.0. Our focus was to test Shopify 2.0’s efficiency and ease in providing unlimited customizations on every page, quick integration of Shopify apps, and flexibility in handling meta information. 

Despite years of dominance in the e-commerce market, Shopify has struggled to compete with open-source systems that allow sellers to develop custom storefronts. The plug-and-play nature of Shopify became a challenge as we started to expand. Customizing a store without re-platforming the website to another platform, such as Magento, has been challenging in the past, and we’ve seen that. 

However, built with performance in mind, we were sure that Shopify 2.0's advanced features would help us gain more control over the website store and it’s operations.

Learn More About Shopify 2.0 Features

TOP-NOTCH TIPS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR SHOPIFY SITE FOR GOOGLE IN 2022

Result: Increased Page Performance, Security & Mobile Friendliness

Updating the current Shopify eCommerce store theme to Shopify 2.0 provided us with increased speed, efficiency, and many other features. Moreover, mobile-friendliness took a leap as soon as we launched our store after Shopify 2.0 migration. 

We began with a 30/100 performance score. After the initial launch phase, we hiked to a 44 (Mobile performance) & an 81 (Desktop Performance). And after the speed upgrades, again the website performance surged to 61 (Mobile performance) & 98 (desktop performance).    

Putting our website to the test in this migration to Shopify 2.0 was important to us. In the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing and eCommerce, we aim to stay ahead of the curve and provide our customers with the best information possible. 

If you’re investigating whether Shopify 2.0 will develop improvements on your website, schedule a consultation with one of our team members to discuss how to make it happen.

Let’s upgrade your eCommerce website so that you can rank higher and perform better!

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