How to Speed Up Your Shopify Store: 10 Practical Tips
A fast Shopify store makes it easier for customers to browse products, find what they need and complete their purchases.
As a store grows, new features, apps and customisations can gradually affect performance. The right improvements can make a noticeable difference, particularly on mobile.
Here are 10 practical areas worth reviewing to help your Shopify store run more efficiently. Several you can check yourself from the Shopify admin; others involve theme code, the kind of work we handle on Shopify speed optimisation projects.
1. Start with a Shopify speed test
Before changing anything, find out where the time actually goes. Google PageSpeed Insights is free and a good place to start. Test your homepage, a busy collection page and a typical product page, on both mobile and desktop.
PageSpeed Insights reports on Google’s three Core Web Vitals:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) – how quickly the main content, usually the hero or product image, appears.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint) – how quickly the page responds when someone taps or clicks, for example on a variant or the add-to-cart button.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) – how much the layout jumps around while the page loads.
The top of the report shows data from real Chrome users, where Google has enough of it. Below that is a lab test on a simulated device. The lab test helps you diagnose problems; the real-user data shows what customers experience.
Shopify’s Web Performance dashboard, in your Shopify admin, shows the same three metrics from your own visitors over time.
2. Review your installed Shopify apps
Some apps work entirely in the admin and add nothing to your storefront. Others load scripts, styles or widgets on your pages. Go through your installed apps and ask:
- Is the app still in use?
- Does it load on the storefront, and on which pages?
- Do two apps overlap? Reviews, upsells and pop-ups are common duplicates.
Then open Online Store → Themes → Customise → App embeds and switch off embeds for apps you no longer need.
Older apps often added code directly to theme files, and uninstalling them doesn’t always remove it. A theme can keep loading scripts for an app that’s long gone, so these leftovers are worth tracking down.
How much difference each change makes depends on the app and how it loads. Removing an unused review widget from every page helps; removing an admin-only reporting app won’t change storefront speed.
3. Optimise product and collection images
Shopify serves images through its own CDN and automatically converts them to modern formats such as WebP for browsers that support them. That handles a lot, but your theme still decides what size of image to request.
If a product card displayed 300 pixels wide downloads a 2,000-pixel image, the visitor waits for pixels they’ll never see. Well-built themes offer several widths using srcset, and sizes tells the browser which one fits the screen.
Check that product thumbnails and collection grids request widths close to their display size, and that hero banners use a smaller image on mobile where the crop allows.
4. Prioritise above-the-fold content
When a page loads, the browser has to decide what to fetch first. The image visitors see first, often the hero banner or the main product image, is usually the element that LCP measures. It should load straight away. Don’t lazy-load it, and consider giving it fetchpriority="high" so the browser fetches it early.
Images further down the page can be lazy-loaded (loading="lazy"), so the browser fetches them as the shopper scrolls, leaving bandwidth free for what’s on screen. Headlines, prices and add-to-cart buttons should be in the initial HTML, so they appear without waiting for JavaScript.
5. Load scripts only where they’re needed
Product-specific features often end up loading across the whole site. Common examples:
- Size guides
- Product configurators
- Comparison tools
- Custom sliders
If a configurator only appears on three product templates, there’s no reason for its JavaScript to load on the homepage, the blog and the cart.
In Online Store 2.0 themes, the cleanest fix is to load a feature’s script from inside the section that uses it, so it only loads where that section appears. Older themes often include everything from the main theme.liquid layout. This is a theme code change, so make it on a duplicate theme and test before publishing.
6. Review your tracking scripts
Marketing tools are essential, and a common source of extra JavaScript. Typical setups include:
- Google Analytics
- Google Tag Manager
- Meta Pixel
- Email marketing integrations such as Klaviyo
- Other advertising and analytics tools, from TikTok to Pinterest
The most common problem is duplication. A store connects Google and Meta through Shopify’s sales channel apps, while an older copy of the same tag is still hard-coded in the theme or firing through Tag Manager. That means extra scripts and, often, double-counted conversions.
Check each tool is installed once, in one place, and remove tags for platforms you no longer use. Shopify’s Customer Events setting is a good home for most tracking, as it keeps pixels separate from the theme. You keep reliable conversion data with less code on every page.
7. Optimise videos and animations
Video, sliders and animation make a store more engaging, and they need careful loading to keep pages responsive.
- Video banners: set a poster image so something appears immediately, and consider a lighter version, or the poster alone, on mobile.
- Product demonstrations: a YouTube or Vimeo embed loads a lot of code. A thumbnail that loads the player on click keeps the page light until someone wants to watch.
- Sliders: the first slide is often the LCP element, so treat it like a hero image. Slides further along can lazy-load.
- Animations: animate
transformandopacitywhere possible, as these are cheap for the browser to run. - Pop-ups: show them as overlays after a short delay. Bars that push the page down cause layout shift.
8. Make better use of web fonts
Every font family and weight is a separate file to download. Two families in four weights each means eight files before text looks right.
- Use only the weights your design needs, often a regular and a bold.
- Remove fonts added by apps or old customisations that no longer appear.
- Make sure text displays straight away in a fallback font while the brand font loads. In CSS this is
font-display: swap, which Shopify’sfont_faceLiquid filter supports. - Preload the one font used for headings or body text above the fold.
9. Improve your Shopify theme code
Customisations add JavaScript, CSS and Liquid logic to a theme over time. Together they can make pages slower to load and, especially, slower to respond, which shows up in INP. Typical culprits:
- Product variant selectors that re-render large parts of the page, or run heavy scripts, on every change.
- Cart drawers that fetch and rebuild the whole cart each time they open.
- Navigation menus with large mega-menus built entirely in JavaScript.
- Collection filtering that reloads the full page when only the product grid needs updating.
- Custom interactive sections added by different developers over the years, each bringing its own libraries.
The fix is usually less work per interaction: updating only the part of the page that changes, breaking long scripts into smaller tasks and removing libraries the browser no longer needs. Shopify’s Section Rendering API, for example, lets a theme refresh one section without reloading the page. On the server, Shopify’s Theme Inspector for Chrome shows which Liquid takes longest to render.
This is where changes make the biggest difference to how responsive a store feels. If your theme has been heavily customised, our Shopify theme customisation work often starts here.
10. Monitor performance as your store changes
Performance changes as your store does, so re-test after:
- Installing apps
- Updating or switching themes
- Adding major functionality
- Introducing new marketing integrations
- Making significant storefront changes
Use the same pages, devices and tools each time, and look at the trend across several tests, as lab scores vary between runs. Shopify’s Web Performance dashboard and the real-user data in PageSpeed Insights both use rolling data, so changes take a few weeks to show fully. A simple log of what changed and when makes it easy to connect a dip with its cause. Regular checks like these are part of our Shopify maintenance and support work.
Need help improving your Shopify store’s speed?
Some performance improvements can be handled directly in Shopify, while others involve theme code, JavaScript and third-party integrations.
At gosite, we help Shopify and Shopify Plus merchants investigate performance issues and improve their existing stores. We work directly with Shopify theme architecture, Liquid, JavaScript and custom storefront functionality.
Explore our Shopify speed optimisation service
Frequently asked questions
What is a good Shopify speed score? Treat the Lighthouse performance score in PageSpeed Insights as a diagnostic tool. It comes from a single simulated test and changes between runs. What matters more is Core Web Vitals from real users: Google rates LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, INP of 200 milliseconds or less and CLS of 0.1 or less as “good”.
Does Shopify automatically optimise images? Partly. Shopify’s CDN resizes images on request and serves modern formats to browsers that support them. Your theme still needs to request sensible sizes for each screen and load the most important images first.
Do Shopify apps affect website speed? It depends on what the app loads on your storefront. Admin-only apps have no effect on page speed. Apps that add scripts, widgets or styles to your pages do, and the impact varies with how well they’re built and where they load.
Does Shopify Plus load faster than regular Shopify? Plus doesn’t make a storefront faster on its own. Plus stores run on the same hosting and CDN as other Shopify plans. Their speed depends on the theme, apps and front-end code, just as it does on any other plan.
Want a faster Shopify store?
We can audit your existing Shopify store, identify performance issues and implement targeted improvements.