How can I speed up a slow Shopify store?

Heya,

Shopify is fully hosted, so there’s no server-side lever to pull here (you can’t move it to a VPS or tune a backend), which actually narrows the problem nicely: almost every real Shopify speed win is front-end, and it’s usually one of three things.

The first and most common is leftover app code. When you remove an app from the admin, Shopify often doesn’t strip the script and style tags it injected into your theme. Open theme.liquid and your section/snippet files and search for <script> and <link> blocks tied to apps you’ve uninstalled, and pull the dead ones. Every one of those is a render-blocking request that’s doing nothing for you now. While you’re in there, count how many apps are still active and inject assets on the storefront. That count, not the image sizes, is usually what’s dragging product and collection pages down.

The second is your LCP element, which on a product page is almost always the main image and on a collection page is the first row of thumbnails. Make sure the hero image is not lazy-loaded (loading=“eager”, or no lazy attribute) and ideally preloaded, while everything below the fold gets loading=“lazy”. Serve the images through Shopify’s CDN at the actual display width using the width parameter rather than shipping a 2000px file into a 400px slot. You said you compressed images already, but wrong-sized-but-compressed still hurts, so it’s worth checking the served dimensions in the network tab.

The third, and the one people miss, is third-party scripts: review widgets, live chat, tracking pixels, A/B tools. These are the biggest source of blocking time and layout shift, and they’re independent of your theme. Defer or async whatever you can, and load things like chat widgets on interaction rather than at page load.

For measuring, treat the Shopify admin speed score as a rough proxy only. Run the actual pages through PageSpeed Insights and look at the field data (real Chrome user metrics) separately from the lab score, and use the Lighthouse treemap to see which script is eating the most main-thread time. That’ll point you straight at whichever of the three above is your real bottleneck instead of guessing.

Heya,

For the leftover app code specifically, if your theme is on Online Store 2.0 (most themes installed in the last few years are), check Online Store, Themes, Customize, then the App Embeds icon in the left sidebar before you go hunting through theme.liquid by hand. Any app that uses Shopify’s app embed system shows up there as a toggle, disabled apps and leftover integrations are visible and removable without touching code. It won’t catch every app, older ones that paste raw script tags directly into theme files still need the manual search, but it’s worth checking first since it’s safer and faster when it applies.

Hope that this helps!

Hi there,

After images and unused apps, the next biggest wins are usually lazy loading for below-the-fold images, deferring non-critical JavaScript, and switching to a leaner theme if your current one is bloated. Dawn is Shopify’s official lightweight theme and a good baseline.

For diagnosing what is actually slow, run the store through PageSpeed Insights and look at the specific recommendations. Largest Contentful Paint and Total Blocking Time are usually the culprits on product pages.

If you are running any custom integrations or a headless Shopify setup that needs its own backend infrastructure, DigitalOcean App Platform is worth considering for hosting that layer with good performance and simple deploys.