#Technical audits

[drishasblog]

Conducting Performance Audits on Shopify Stores

A performance audit is a thorough evaluation of a website's efficiency and effectiveness. For Shopify stores, it involves analyzing various aspects of the store, including speed, user experience (UX), and search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure optimal performance and customer satisfaction.

Importance of Conducting Performance Audits on Shopify Stores Conducting regular performance audits on Shopify stores is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge in the e-commerce market.

These audits help identify and resolve issues that could hinder the store's performance, leading to improved customer experience, higher conversion rates, and better overall business outcomes.

Types and Categories

Types of Performance Audits

Technical Audits Technical audits focus on the backend elements of the Shopify store. This includes server response times, code efficiency, and technical SEO aspects like structured data and sitemap configurations.

UX/UI Audits UX/UI audits assess the user interface and user experience aspects of the store. This includes evaluating the design, layout, navigation, and overall usability to ensure a seamless shopping experience for customers.

Content Audits Content audits involve reviewing all the content on the Shopify store, including product descriptions, blogs, and meta tags. The goal is to ensure that the content is relevant, engaging, and optimized for search engines.

Categories of Performance Metrics

Speed and Load Time Speed and load time metrics measure how quickly the Shopify store loads and performs under various conditions. Key metrics include First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Time to Interactive (TTI).

User Experience User experience metrics focus on how easily users can navigate and interact with the store. This includes assessing bounce rates, session durations, and conversion paths.

SEO Performance SEO performance metrics evaluate how well the store ranks on search engines. This includes tracking keyword rankings, organic traffic, and the effectiveness of meta tags and structured data.

Symptoms and Signs

Indicators of Poor Performance

Slow Loading Times Slow loading times are a primary indicator of poor performance. If a Shopify store takes too long to load, customers are likely to abandon it, leading to high bounce rates and lost sales.

High Bounce Rates High bounce rates indicate that users are leaving the store shortly after arriving. This can be due to various issues, such as slow load times, poor navigation, or irrelevant content.

Low Conversion Rates Low conversion rates suggest that while users are visiting the store, they are not completing purchases. This could be due to complex checkout processes, unappealing product pages, or trust issues.

Common Performance Issues

Image Optimization Unoptimized images can significantly slow down a Shopify store. Large image files take longer to load, affecting the overall speed and performance.

Code Bloat Excessive or poorly written code can lead to slow loading times and reduced performance. This includes unnecessary JavaScript, CSS, and third-party plugins.

Inconsistent Design Inconsistent design elements can confuse users and create a poor shopping experience. This includes mismatched fonts, colors, and layouts that do not align with the brand's identity.

Causes and Risk Factors

Common Causes of Performance Issues

Unoptimized Images Images that are not properly optimized for web use can drastically affect load times. This includes large file sizes, incorrect formats, and missing alt attributes.

Excessive JavaScript Too much JavaScript can slow down the rendering process of the store. It is essential to minimize and defer JavaScript to ensure it does not block the loading of critical resources.

Poor Theme Choices Choosing a theme that is not optimized for performance can lead to various issues. It is important to select a theme that is lightweight, well-coded, and regularly updated by the developer.

Risk Factors

High Traffic Volumes Stores experiencing high traffic volumes without proper optimization can suffer from slow load times and crashes. It is crucial to ensure that the server and infrastructure can handle peak loads.

Frequent Theme Changes Frequently changing themes can introduce new performance issues. Each theme comes with its own set of code and assets that need to be optimized.

Extensive Use of Apps and Plugins While apps and plugins add functionality, they can also add bloat to the store. It is important to use only necessary apps and regularly audit their impact on performance.

Diagnosis and Tests

Tools for Performance Testing

Google PageSpeed Insights Google PageSpeed Insights is a tool that analyzes the content of a web page and provides suggestions to make it faster. It provides both mobile and desktop performance scores.

GTmetrix GTmetrix offers detailed insights into a website's performance, including load times, size, and the number of requests. It provides actionable recommendations to improve speed and efficiency.

Lighthouse Lighthouse is an open-source tool from Google that audits a web page's performance, accessibility, and SEO. It is integrated into Chrome DevTools and provides detailed reports.

Conducting Diagnostic Tests

Setting Up Tests Setting up performance tests involves configuring the tools to analyze the Shopify store. This includes specifying the URLs to test, setting test parameters, and scheduling regular audits.

Interpreting Results Interpreting the results from performance tools involves understanding the key metrics and recommendations. This includes identifying areas of improvement and prioritizing them based on their impact.

Key Metrics to Monitor

First Contentful Paint (FCP) FCP measures the time it takes for the first piece of content to appear on the screen. It is a crucial metric for assessing the initial load performance.

Time to Interactive (TTI) TTI measures the time it takes for a page to become fully interactive. This includes the ability to click buttons, scroll, and interact with the page elements.

Total Blocking Time (TBT) TBT measures the total time that the main thread is blocked and unable to respond to user input. It is an important metric for understanding the overall responsiveness of the store.

Treatment Options

Technical Improvements

Image Optimization Optimizing images involves compressing them without sacrificing quality, using the correct formats (such as WebP), and implementing lazy loading to defer off-screen images.

Minifying CSS and JavaScript Minifying CSS and JavaScript involves removing unnecessary characters, comments, and whitespace to reduce file sizes. This helps improve load times and performance.

Leveraging Browser Caching Browser caching stores static resources in the user's browser, allowing subsequent visits to load faster. This involves setting appropriate cache headers and expiration times.

UX/UI Enhancements

Improving Navigation Improving navigation involves simplifying menus, using clear labels, and ensuring that users can easily find what they are looking for. This enhances the overall user experience.

Ensuring Mobile Responsiveness Ensuring mobile responsiveness involves designing the store to work seamlessly on all devices, including smartphones and tablets. This includes using responsive design techniques and testing on various screen sizes.

Enhancing Accessibility Enhancing accessibility involves making the store usable for all users, including those with disabilities. This includes using semantic HTML, providing

conclusion

If you need help with conducting performance audits on Shopify stores, Arham Ecommerce is here to assist you.

[p00pypant]

Hello to the 3 other people who listen to dogbowl and like homestuck

OG Album Cover:

[geeky-nightphilosopher]

The Rashomon Job is hands down the best episode and nobody can tell me otherwise.

Like, your gonna tell me all of these *professional criminals* can't recognize each other five years later? And each of their stories are somehow accurate to how they perceive each other- even without them noticing at first. I couldn't get over how Hardison, Nate, and Parker all have Eliot holding basically a sword to Hardison's throat. 🤣 Sophie and Nate's were the probably the most accurate.

The ending was so sweet too, because it's all a redo. Even though they had Sophie, Parker, and Hardison running to go steal it and leaving Eliot and Nate at the bar- the viewers still get the implication that they'll steal it as a team. Especially when you get that little amused smile/nod from Eliot and that confirmation from Nate.

Nate was practically telling Eliot- Go. Watch their backs. Then he went to because he didn't want to be left out.

Also- Parker's imitation of Sophie is how I think she processes everyone's voice. 😂🫣

[shaniacsboogara]

boog's gotta get knowledge. boog's gotta go to college

[ya-what--ya-erster]

IM GONNA BE IN NEWSIES GUYS IM GONNA BE IN NEWSIES OH MY GOSH

[softitinstitute]

[like-eachothersghosts]

it sucks so much ass that i can’t use any of my paintings for my portfolio because they’re all fanart :( you might say ‘oh jey, why don’t you just paint other things?’ very easy answer to that. i don’t want to :) i paint for myself and i don’t want to have to do things i won’t enjoy for the sake of a portfolio

[talkorsomething]

Start of week 2 (before stretches) & i am pleased to report that the x2 increase of tosses does not yet feel like too much

[misstwisted]

I was wondering why JT’s “this is gonna ruin the world tour” reminded me of something, and I didn’t know what until I rewatched the dead poets in NYC video. And then I realized something:

it has the same energy as ethans utterly distraught “WE’RE NOT GONNA MAKE THE AUDITION. WE’RE NOT GONNA MAKE THE FUCKING AUDITION.”

[iiboronii]

Do we have any altos here?

[agentravensong]

post-hamlet thoughts

tl;dr my college did hamlet and i was in it and it was cool

first of all, in case i hadn't made this clear already, this was entirely student-produced. i mean, we got some money from the theater department, but people-wise, it was all students.

i've told the rest of the cast this time and time again, but they're so good. insanely dedicated and humbling in their talent.

our hamlet, horatio, ophelia, and laertes were all freshman, and they were all stellar. ophelia and laertes broke my heart every night in the second half with their anger and their sadness. horatio always brings top energy to scenes and had lots of funny moments (espec counting his doubling as the second gravedigger) but also made me feel things (we staged act 4 scene 6 as him alone on stage reading hamlet's letter to the audience and he killed it every time). and our hamlet was just incredible; a pleasure to act against as guildenstern and a pleasure to watch / listen to in their more emotional scenes.

and everyone else was great too! our polonius was always funny but also had genuine moments of connection with his kids; our cladius brought some great depth to the role (his take on the monologue in act 3 scene 3 was great) while still being despicable, especially in his manipulation of laertes; our gertrude brought our director's take on her to life impeccably; and, of course, i had a wonderful and hilarious partner in our rosencrantz :)

not to mention our quartet of players (who also filled out the other miscellaneous roles) who had a ton of great moments. shout-outs in particular to the guy who doubled as the first gravedigger and sang his sung lines as a sea shanty (honestly, i think he could have been a great guildenstern or rosencrantz in another universe).

the crew, of course, was also amazing. there were like 150 cues? my friend (the writer i mentioned in this post) did a fantastic job with the lights. the people behind the staging and makeup did just as well. and the costumes were so fun! everyone looked great; we had a consistent black-white-red-brown color palette that tied it all together. special shout-out to the player king wearing a white shirt with a black cape while cladius wore a zipped-up leather jacket and a white cape.

oh, and me and ros? we got fedoras :) i may share a photo later. maybe.

we did our show in the college black box theater (inside the fine arts building), which i do not currently have the brain cells to try and explain the layout of. it's a kind of weird space, but i think we made the most of it. for the majority of the show i was off stage left, meaning i was hanging out at the top of the stairs which serve as the main entrance and exit to the theater (sitting/standing where i couldn't be seen by the audience obv). you can't really see the stage at all from there but you sure can hear the actors, and by the time of the show that was (mostly) enough for me.

as far as how the actual shows went?

friday was our most engaged audience. their laughter was greatly appreciated in the early scenes ...slightly less so when everyone was dying in the final scene. i mean, i get it, people start dropping like flies and actually foaming at the mouth and spitting out (fake) blood; it's a lot. i applaud hamlet and horatio for staying in character through it. everyone did a great job that night; it was probably better than all our dress rehearsals as a whole.

saturday, at least from my pov, had kind of weird vibes at the start? i don't know how much of it was people getting to bed late the previous night, how much of it was overconfidence, and how much of it was people getting in their own heads, but it was our lowest energy show. the audience wasn't as audibly engaged either, but they did give us a big applause. i felt more good than bad about it by the end, for sure.

especially in retrospect, because, despite us having a smaller crowd at today's matinee, everyone was back on the ball. the ending in particular i think was the best we've ever done it. it was probably my best performance as well.

to be clear, i wouldn't rate any of our three shows below an 8 out of 10, for what that's worth. everyone gave so much to their performances; the funny bits were funny even when the audience didn't seem to think so, and i was always getting caught up in my feelings in the second act. you can't ask for much more than that.

now, here's a compilation of things from the production in no real order:

i already posted about this, but having the blood stains on stage where people die from the beginning of every show? *chef's kiss*

i'll also restate the thing i mentioned in the tags of that post: characters who were murderers had symbolic blood makeup after they killed someone. cladius had a bloody ear from the start of the show, the meaning of which becomes clear once you see the player king get poison poured in his ears; hamlet got blood on their face during intermission that's meant to be polonius's blood; and, arguably most significantly, gertrude had bloody handprints around her neck when she entered at the end of act 4, which, in addition to her hair and arms being dripping wet, is meant to suggest that the story she tells about ophelia's death is, in fact, a cover for something less accidental.

as mentioned above, our director's take on gertrude in general was, from my understanding, pretty different from the standard. to quote from his character spines, "you fundamentally want to prepare your son hamlet to be king; you are playing essentially a game of chess to do so." it was really compelling to see in action. the way she performed act 4 scene 7? chilling.

speaking of those character spines, the first line of horatio's is literally just, "You are in love with Hamlet." and boy howdy did that come through

prime example of that (other than just, all of his and hamlet's interactions, which were wonderful): when horatio finished reading the letter from hamlet, he sniffed it, in a very sweet and very not-platonic way

it was an unintentional running gag throughout the whole process that other cast members would forget between ros and me which character we were playing - to the point that every performance, when hamlet first greeted us, even though i would get to them first, they addressed me first, and it's written that they say my name first, they would call me rosencrantz and our ros guildenstern. ...someone should write a play about that.

i might have posted about this already, but in ros and i's first scene with hamlet, when the two of them start talking about child actors, hamlet made us sit in the thrones, and we would make moves to leave of varying boldness that they, of course, never let us follow through on. this then got basically repeated in act 3 scene 2 except that horatio got to join in on the fun of relentlessly mocking us

(the thing where hamlet handed me their copy of william shakespeare's complete works while they dud the "what is a man" mimi monologue got dropped at some point in the dress rehearsals, unfortunately. they did flip through it with the players though)

during the play within a play, polonius would keep falling asleep and ros and i would keep waking him up

(we also got to do some fun silent banter back in act 2 scene 2 while hamlet and the players were doing their thing)

then the bit after that with the recorders, aka guildenstern's defining moment, was just so fun. hamlet and horatio basically sandwiched ros and me between the two of them, and hamlet and i played off each other very well (at least imo), and though i couldn't see what horatio and ros were doing behind me i know that it got some good laughs. and i could tell every night that the scene landed despite the shakespearean language barrier, so i can't help but be satisfied.

my other best moment was when the king told me to go get polonius's body from the stairs and i got to slump and make a "do i have to?" face before my (final) exit. i managed to actually get some chuckles from that tonight, from the crowd that, again, laughed the least in general, and i can't put into words how euphoric i was to have that be my last moment playing guildenstern.

from the rest of the second half of the show, which i am not in, i will highlight a) the gravedigger eventually realizing after shoveling for minutes on end that he's been shoveling literally nothing (love me a good little fourth wall break) and b) when hamlet and laertes come to physical blows over ophelia, horatio, on his line, steps between them, draws laertes's sword, and takes a stance pointing it at laertes to hold him off, all in basically one glorious motion.

oh, and the ending, of course.

as i alluded to way earlier, we had fake blood and alka-seltzer tablets that the people who died in act 5 scene 2 used to great effect (particularly the people who died via poison)

speaking of that scene, the sword fight was very neat! well-choreographed and well-enacted. real foils btw

and the way hamlet and horatio performed the ending? more than anything, the way hamlet said "give me the cup; let go!" - that shit hurt, in the best way, every night. (and though hamlet died in the king's throne (with the king's crown on), horatio held / clung to them the whole damn time)

for a lighter final note: our polonius doubled as fortinbras and came on at the ending in this huge, heavy, vampire-ass cloak, accompanied by our director as the messenger from england who announces my and ros's death :)

thankfully, we did record our last dress rehearsal, so we do have a version of it that we'll get to watch back in the future. i won't be able to share it with any of y'all (we will apparently be in BIG trouble if we post it anywhere online) but it'll be nice to have for me.

funny thing that happened while i was typing this long-ass post out: i kept using present tense and then realizing i had to change it to past tense. and by "funny" here, i mean, uh... oof.

we never got a perfect run-through where no lines were skipped over, but, i mean, it's fucking hamlet. we did this shit in like a month and a half (with a week lost to spring break); it's more than impressive that the show turned out how it did. it was a group labor of love, and one of the best things i've ever gotten to be a part of.

and i miss it already.

...at least there's movie night on tuesday :)

[youremyonlyhope]

I'm not a "new musical theatre style music" person. Never have been.

Even when I was doing voice lessons, I'd steer towards the golden age or jazzy musical theatre songs. My voice teacher would have to drag me kicking and screaming towards adding anything new musical theatre to my repertoire. For a while, the most modern song in my book was I Know The Truth from Aida, and I wouldn't count that as new musical theatre style since I mean more the Pasek&Paul or Joe Iconis type.

And now I have an audition coming up for a small production of a show in that style and I'm supposed to sing a song in a similar style. And I'm looking at all my sheet music like... let me do some Cole Porter... or Gershwin... at least Sondheim please...

[pallases]

[sparkles-oflight]

I THINK I'M GETTING SICK, SLAY

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

tfw everything gets rescheduled/announced at the same time so you now have four auditions within the span of six days