Check your store at pagespeed.web.dev now. The mobile score is the one that matters - mobile traffic is typically 60-70% of ecommerce visits, and Google uses mobile performance as its primary ranking signal. If you're below 70, you have a meaningful problem. Below 50 and you're actively losing sales to load time.
The good news: many Shopify speed problems are caused by fixable things that don't require a developer.
What you can fix yourself
Image compression (biggest single impact). The most common cause of slow Shopify stores is large, uncompressed images. A product image exported from Photoshop or straight from a camera phone is typically 3-8MB. At web resolution, it should be under 300KB.
Before uploading any image to Shopify, run it through Squoosh (squoosh.app - free, browser-based) or TinyPNG (tinypng.com). Set the output to WebP format if possible, or JPEG at 80-85% quality. Resize to 2048px on the longest edge maximum. A 2048px WebP at 80% quality looks identical to the original at normal viewing distances and loads 90% faster.
If you have existing images already uploaded at large file sizes, you'll need to replace them. Go through your top-selling products first.
Remove unused apps. This is the second biggest lever and the easiest. Every installed Shopify app - even ones that are "inactive" in your Shopify admin - may still be loading JavaScript on your store. App code that loads on your store is loaded for every customer on every page visit, even if the app is doing nothing visible.
Go to Shopify admin - Apps and look for anything you installed to test but never actively use. Uninstall it properly (don't just disable it). Check your Lighthouse score before and after - it's common to recover 10-15 points from removing 3-4 unused apps.
Defer non-critical apps. Apps that don't need to load immediately (chat widgets, review carousels, loyalty badges) can be set to load after the main page content. Some apps have a "lazy load" option in their settings. If an app provides this, enable it.
Optimise video. If you use video on your homepage or product pages, ensure it's compressed for web delivery. A 100MB brand video should be under 5MB for autoplay background use. Use a video hosting service (Vimeo, YouTube) rather than uploading directly to Shopify for any video over 1MB - hosted video loads via CDN and doesn't impact your store's server delivery.
Reduce font loading. Custom fonts add HTTP requests and can cause a "flash of unstyled text" (FOUT) while they load. If your theme uses 3-4 custom font weights, consider whether you actually need all of them - reducing to 2 font weights (regular and bold) can reduce font loading time noticeably.
What requires a developer
Some speed improvements require editing your theme's Liquid code or JavaScript - things a developer handles as part of a speed audit:
- Render-blocking scripts. Third-party scripts (tracking pixels, chat tools) that load synchronously block page rendering. Moving these to load asynchronously requires theme code changes.
- Lazy loading for below-fold images. Images that appear below the fold should load only when the user scrolls toward them. Modern Shopify themes handle this natively; older themes may not.
- Eliminating unused CSS and JavaScript. Themes often include CSS and JS for sections you're not using. Tree-shaking unused code requires a developer.
- LCP optimisation. The Largest Contentful Paint element (typically your hero image) needs to load as fast as possible. Preloading the LCP image and optimising how it's served requires theme-level changes.
Setting a realistic baseline
After doing the self-service fixes (image compression, removing unused apps), a reasonable expectation for a standard Shopify store is:
- Mobile Lighthouse: 65-80 for a well-maintained store with a quality theme
- Mobile Lighthouse: 80-95 for a store with a speed-optimised theme and developer-level optimisation
If your score is below 60 after doing the self-service fixes, the problem is likely in your theme code or a specific app that's loading a large JavaScript payload. A Speed Audit identifies the exact cause with a prioritised fix list.
