Guides — performance optimization

There’s a new tool in the toolbox when it comes to optimizing the web performance of Shopify these days. It’s not even officially in the W3C spec yet, but it’s supported by most major browsers - and doesn’t hurt the rest - and is measured and recommended by Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, which impacts your SEO rankings. In short - it’s a huge win for developers and Shopify partners who are always looking for new ways to reduce the load times of their clients’ stores, helping improve their on site conversion rate and drive revenue for the business.  It’s a...

When considering the performance of Shopify sites, images are often one of the main contributors to poor load times. In this tutorial, I'll outline our process for optimizing all the images which are part of the theme assets. a note on images in Shopify: Images in Shopify can be stored in three locations. There are backend images, associated with admin-accessible "objects" like blog posts, collections, products, and variants. Next, there are images entered through the Theme Editor or "Customizer", which can also be uploaded and managed under Settings > Files. Lastly there are theme images, which are pulled from the theme's asset...

Recently we were contracted by an agency for a performance optimization project for a newly created site on Shopify. We had some great results, which we'd like to share.  Audit We began with a performance audit, analyzing how the page loads and renders for various devices and under various network conditions. The goal is to identify all the areas of the site which are contributing to poor performance, and then rank them by two factors: by the magnitude of the negative performance impact, and by the difficulty of correcting or changing them. This allows us to begin with the lowest hanging...

If you're looking in pagespeed insights or in a critical render path analysis, you may see that there are many scss and css files being called prior to your initial render. Sometimes it makes sense to combine these into a single or several files. In general, you want to have one fast first render that paints the above the fold content.  In the ideal world, we'd inline the critical css and dependency free (vanilla) javascript for a fast first render. However, when it comes to most modern websites that continue to blur the line between web pages and web apps,...