How to speed up your Shopify store (10 ways)

Most Shopify speed problems come from a handful of culprits, and you can fix the biggest ones yourself. Here are ten, ordered by impact.

The big wins

1. Compress and resize images. Oversized images are the #1 cause of slow stores. Resize to display size and serve modern formats (WebP).
2. Lazy-load below-the-fold images so they don’t block the first paint.
3. Audit your apps. Uninstall any you don’t actively use — each injects scripts that slow every page, even ones it doesn’t run on.
4. Remove homepage sliders/carousels. Heavy to load and they rarely convert.

The next level

5. Trim third-party scripts — chat widgets, popups, extra analytics. Keep only what earns its weight.
6. Limit custom fonts to one or two weights; each font file is a request.
7. Choose a lightweight theme. Bloated themes are hard to outrun — a lean one is the easiest long-term fix.
8. Defer non-critical JavaScript so content renders first.
9. Lean on Shopify’s CDN and image optimisation rather than fighting it with custom code.
10. Reduce redirects and broken assets, which add silent delays.

Test on a real phone

Desktop on fast wifi hides the problem. Test on a phone over mobile data — that’s where most of your traffic and most of your losses are.

Know your number first

Before and after each change, measure. The free page speed test reads your real load time and shows what slow speed is costing you in revenue. Start with images and unused apps — they’re usually the difference between “slow” and “fine.” For every revenue leak in one score, see Revyfix.