How to Speed Up Your Shopify Store (5 Fixes)

Across the Shopify stores we scanned, the median mobile PageSpeed score was 57, with 29% scoring below 50 ("poor") and a typical load time of 12.4 seconds to show the main content — well over Google's 2.5-second target. A quick note on honesty: this was a smaller sample than our WordPress or Wix data — 79 stores — so treat these as a solid indication rather than a precise industry figure. But the pattern is clear and consistent with what most Shopify owners experience: stores get slow as they grow, and one cause dominates.

Why Shopify stores are often slow

Shopify handles the hard technical parts well — fast, secure hosting, a global content network, and automatic image delivery are all built in. So when a Shopify store is slow, it's rarely the platform itself. It's usually the things bolted on top.

The biggest culprit is apps. The Shopify App Store makes it effortless to add features — reviews, upsells, pop-ups, loyalty programs, live chat, currency converters — and each one injects its own JavaScript into your store. That code has to download and run before your pages become fully interactive, and on mobile that's exactly what tanks a speed score. A store running fifteen apps is carrying fifteen sets of extra code on every page, whether the customer uses those features or not. Speed on Shopify is mostly a story of restraint. For the wider view of what slows any site, our guide to why your website is slow is a good companion read.

How to speed up your Shopify store

1. Remove apps you don't use

This is the highest-impact fix for most Shopify stores, and it costs nothing. Go through your installed apps and be honest about which ones actually earn their place. That trial app you installed last year, the second review widget, the pop-up tool you switched off but never uninstalled — each one may still be loading code on your storefront.

Uninstalling an app usually removes its scripts, but not always cleanly — some leave leftover code in your theme. If you're comfortable, check your theme for orphaned snippets from apps you've removed, or ask a Shopify expert to do a quick clean-up. Fewer apps means less JavaScript, and less JavaScript means a faster store.

2. Choose a fast, modern theme

Older and heavily-customised themes can carry a lot of weight — bundled sliders, animations and features you may not even use. Shopify's own themes are built to be fast, and Dawn (Shopify's free flagship theme) is a strong, lightweight starting point that scores well out of the box.

If your store has been slow since you built it, or you're on an old third-party theme loaded with extras, moving to a modern theme can reset your foundation. It's a bigger job than the other fixes here, so test on a duplicate theme first — but it can lift a store that's slow at its core.

3. Compress your images

Product photography is the lifeblood of an online store, and it's also a major source of page weight. Shopify's built-in image CDN automatically serves appropriately-sized versions of your images, which helps a lot — but it works best when you don't upload enormous files to begin with.

Before uploading, compress your product and banner images and keep them to sensible dimensions. A free compression tool can shrink a photo's file size dramatically with no visible drop in quality. Do this across your best-selling product pages first, since those are the ones customers actually load.

4. Limit sliders, carousels and third-party scripts

Homepage sliders and image carousels look dynamic, but they load several images at once and often rely on extra JavaScript — a poor trade for something most visitors never click through. Consider replacing a carousel with a single strong hero image.

The same goes for third-party scripts you add outside of apps: chat widgets, analytics and marketing trackers, currency tools and social feeds all add loading time. Keep the ones that genuinely drive sales, and clear out the rest. Every script you remove is time your store gets back.

5. Keep an eye on speed as you grow

The reason so many Shopify stores drift into the 50s isn't one bad decision — it's dozens of small ones over time, as apps and features accumulate. The single best long-term habit is to review your apps and scripts every few months and remove anything you've stopped using. Treat speed as ongoing hygiene, not a one-off project, and your store stays fast as it grows.

How much difference will it make?

Because Shopify already handles hosting and image delivery, your gains come mostly from trimming apps and scripts — and those gains can be real. A store sitting near our median of 57 can often reach the 70s or better simply by removing unused apps and cleaning up leftover code. Reaching a perfect 90+ is genuinely hard on any e-commerce store — product pages are feature-rich by nature — so a realistic, honest target is climbing firmly out of the "poor" band and into "needs work" territory, which is exactly where the checkout-abandoning slowness lives.

To understand what you're aiming for and what Google actually rewards, see what a good PageSpeed score is and how Core Web Vitals are measured.

Check your own Shopify store

Since apps and scripts are usually the hidden cost, the fastest way to find your slowest link is to measure it. A free scan gives you your real mobile PageSpeed score, your load time, and a plain-English list of what's weighing your store down — so you know which apps and images to tackle first. No jargon, no signup, no card.