Natural Cosmetics Brand Nearly Triples Website Performance After Switching to Shopify

    Vapour Organic Beauty “blurs the line between skincare and makeup” with their high-quality line of natural cosmetic and skincare products. A longtime client of Fountain City, Vapour Organic Beauty was ready to take their ecommerce website to the next level to keep up with their rapid growth and best position themselves for future success.

    The Challenge: Poor Website Performance and Lack of Customization

    Vapour Organic Beauty’s website was being run on an outdated CMS that performed sluggishly and was difficult and/or impossible to customize in the ways they wanted. (NOTE: We can’t mention which CMS they were using, but it was not WordPress or Drupal or any of the platforms in which we specialize.)

    A website audit we performed revealed major concerns that were hindering performance, such as the images not being scaled and optimized.  There were also concerns about caching, load order of assets and lack of compression.

    A Google performance test returned a very poor performance rating of 26 out of 100:

    Vapour Beauty Desktop Performance - Before

    The website’s mobile performance was even worse, scoring a dismal 23 out of 100:

    Vapour Beauty Mobile Performance - Before

    In addition, the website had a number of broken links and was not effectively using title tags and headlines–important SEO factors–among a host other issues.

    The Solution: Migrating Website to Shopify

    Working together with Vapour Organic Beauty to determine their overall business needs and goals, we helped them decide on Shopify as the ideal solution.

    Not only did we believe that Shopify would help them improve their website’s performance, but it would also give them a greater degree of flexibility and customization to get the features and designs they wanted. Furthermore, Shopify would give them excellent reporting and the ability to view and analyze their data in ways that were not possible before.

    So, we moved forward with conducting a full migration of Vapour Organic Beauty’s data, customers, products, images and more to Shopify.

    The Results: Better Performance, SEO, Flexibility

    Just one month after migrating to Shopify, the improvements were staggering.

    According to Google’s speed test (see below) the new Shopify site produced a score of 79 for desktop, which although generates a rating of “Medium”, it is in fact at the borderline (80) of “Medium” and “Good”:

    Vapour Beauty Desktop Performance - After

    This is a MASSIVE improvement from the prior rating of 28, and it will most definitely have a positive impact on the site’s SEO.

    Google shows a similar improvement on the website’s mobile performance (see below), with a “Fast” speed rating and a “Medium” optimization score of 67, which again is nearly triple the previous performance optimization score of 23:

    Vapour Beauty Mobile Performance - After

    Mobile performance is a major factor in SEO, and is projected to continue increasing in relevancy as usage continues to move in that direction.

    In addition, the new website’s HTML tags are greatly improved, the meta descriptions are almost all unique, the image sizing is fantastic, and the pages load quickly–all important factors for SEO.

    Conclusion

    Vapour Organic Beauty’s new ecommerce website on Shopify is a massive improvement on both desktop and mobile performance, and ultimately translates to a positive impact on SEO.

    A site that loads quickly is important for multiple reasons, including:

    • Google has validated that the speed at which your site loads ultimately affects its position in its search results.
    • Every second that a site loads slower than 2 seconds has been shown to increase a website’s bounce rate.
    • A fast loading site encourages users to stay and read more content, and improves retention, repeat visits and your sites sales/conversion rates.

    Improving website performance is a challenge that needs to be addressed on an ongoing basis to stay on top of the latest technologies, trends, and search algorithms.

    There is still work to be done on Vapour Organic Beauty’s website to improve the company’s website even further (which is currently in progress), but this is a perfect example of the success that could be achieved in certain situations by switching to Shopify.

    Fountain City is a Shopify Plus Partner, and we are proficient on multiple other platforms as well.  Let us help you decide if Shopify is right for your business, or if there is a more appropriate solution for your unique situation.