How to speed up a Shopify store

Shopify’s web performance reports show how real visitors experienced the store on three measures: how fast the main content loaded, how stable the layout was, and how quickly the page responded. Note the figures for the home page, a collection page and a product page. Our guide to why a Shopify store is slow explains the causes behind them.

List every installed app and what it does for a shopper. Shopify’s advice is to check that each one creates enough value to make up for its cost in performance. Uninstall the ones that do not.

An uninstalled app can leave its code in the theme. Look through the theme for snippets and scripts belonging to apps that are gone, or have a developer do it. Leftover code loads on every page for nothing.

A theme several years old carries code written for an older Shopify. Update it to its latest version, or move to a current theme. Shopify says its own current themes are free and optimised for performance.

The first screen decides how fast a page feels. Replace a slideshow or an autoplaying video with one image and a heading. Shopify resizes and compresses images automatically, so the gain here is in having fewer of them, not smaller ones.

Tracking pixels, chat widgets and embedded feeds added by hand over the years all load on every visit. Remove the ones no longer used. Keep one analytics tool, not three.

Use two font families at most. Then return to the reports. The real-visitor figures take about a month to reflect a change in full, so judge the result then, and compare it with a competitor’s product page tested in Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

A store that has been through all seven steps and is still slow beside its competitors is limited by its theme’s design. A lighter theme, or a storefront rebuilt for speed, is the remaining step. Our guide to whether Shopify is bad for SEO covers what else decides how a store ranks.