A key element of a successful Shopify store is page load speed. You don’t want a bloated page causing users to bounce before it loads. Uploading an unoptimized Gif can cause the page load time to increase drastically, and push your page load time over the recommended 3 seconds.
Still, if done right, a Gif can be an eye-catching and helpful way to display your product from multiple angles or show what it does as soon as the viewer lands on the page. This blog will go through the process of embedding a Gif in a Shopify product page.
Creating a Gif
To create a Gif file, you would need to first decide on a video clip that presents the product that displays it the way you wish, be it from all sides or how it functions. This video clip needs to be as short and succinct as possible.
Once you have a source video, you can either use one of the free online tools out there to convert it. If it’s an online tool, make sure it doesn’t leave a watermark on the final image. Alternatively, you can use Adobe Premiere to export a gif from a video if you have access to that. Either way, go easy on the total size of the image (the smaller the better) and make sure the final file isn’t that large.
Choose a size that is no larger than the space where you’ll put it in, otherwise, you’re just increasing load times for no reason.
It is highly recommended to use a video file alternative to the actual gif format such as WebM or mp4, as it will come out cleaner while being a much smaller-sized file.
CSS Animations as a Tool of Cognitive Understanding
There’s an element known as the cognitive load, also referred to as the ability of your working memory to deal with the amount of data. Since every day your brain gets bombarded with millions of points of information, it needs to process these in the right way to understand them. Animations can enrich the overall shopping/viewing experience since your landing page is the eyes of the customers, and therefore you need to streamline the presentation you make. A good example of it can be:
Every time your customers are trying to subscribe to your newsletter with incomplete information, the form would shake side-to-side, quite similar to how humans gesture when they shake their heads in disapproval. Such ‘breaking-the-fourth-wall’ interactions can go the extra mile in getting things done the right way with your customers, who spend less time and energy than they normally do while shopping at other websites.
The entire cusp of human understanding is based on how much information your mind can process at a given time, especially when data is coming through hot and in large volumes. The process begins with your sensory memory filters, present in the left, right, and center of your brain handles, sorts, and saves data, while the other portions of your brain analyze these data parallelly. Often, the phenomenon of cognitive overload happens and your mind is no longer capable of comprehending information comfortably, and instead leads to growing frustration and compromised decision making.
As observed in various relevant studies, cognitive load can effectively handle the usage of animation that may help in lowering the complexity of the information for the human mind, given its pace of introducing data to users, without getting overwhelmed. These strategic approaches can be transparent, filled with clarity that can urge users to respond better on different Call-to-action.
Inserting The Gif File Into Shopify Product Page
Normally eCommerce sites love to present all of their products on their product wall, which leaves a customer feeling overwhelmed or too exhausted to make a decision. Instead, you need to show them more than you tell them for giving them full length and cover to explore your products and find suitable products according to their preferred decision.
Therefore, we would recommend you add gif files to your products showcasing all of its looks in detail, from all angles making the users feel more connected to your product. You can start by uploading the files to your Shopify product page:
Step #1:
Go to your Shopify product page and insert the gif animation in the product copy and insert the gif animation of the product copy. Trying and inserting the gif animation into the ‘normal’ product images since it would not let it get uploaded. Instead, you can get it hosted on a cloud server, or even on your Google Drive.
Step #2:
Once you’re done with uploading the gif on the cloud server, all you need to do is fix the image URL and paste it on your Shopify product page.
Things to Consider When Using Gif Images in Shopify
While animations are a great way to portray your products to your customers they may slow down your eCommerce website a lot without a constant check. Therefore, you need to closely watch over the varying loading speeds.
- Try to scale your gifs to lower-quality renders for light-on-loading and better speed.
- You can also choose to split the gif files into individual two or more gif files, which you can add sparingly to the product images, thus making them stand out without messing with the page load speed.
Conclusion
The above strategies can provide the users with a completely distraction-free, shopping experience and ensure their attention is directed towards the task at hand. Once done correctly, animations can lead your visitors through tasks, give them cues into completing tasks, as well as keep them interested.
In fact, as a business owner, you’d require custom Shopify solutions to give your audience an enriching shopping experience, and therefore we’d recommend the following:
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Lucy Adam