In this article, we’ll walk you through exactly how to speed up your Shopify store, along with 10 essential tips to boost your site’s performance in 2025.
Understanding Shopify Store Speed
Before getting into the tips, it’s important to understand why the speed of your store matters and what metrics you can use to measure it.akes
Why is Speed Important for Your Store?
Shopify store speed has an impact on many different areas including conversion rate, bounce rate and user experience. Put simply, slower stores frustrate users making them less likely to checkout and more likely to leave.
Additionally, speed also has an impact on search engine rankings as Google prefers faster loading pages.
Metrics to Measure Shopify Speed
Moving on, here are 5 vital metrics you can use to measure your shopify store’s speed. These metrics can be generated for your Shopify store using a tool like pagespeed.web.dev.
First Contentful Paint
First contentful paint (FCP) marks the first point in the page load timeline. FCP measures the amount of time it takes for the user to see the first content on your website.
An FCP less than 1.8 seconds is generally considered good.
Largest Contentful Paint
Largest contentful paint (LCP) measures how fast the biggest single content element takes to display on your store. The main difference between FCP and LCP is LCP focuses on the largest piece of content whereas FCP measures time until any content shows.
A good LCP time is 2.5 seconds or less.
Total Blocking Time
Total blocking time (TBT) measures the time during the page loading when the main thread is blocked. While the main thread is blocked, user’s won’t be able to interact so it can negatively impact their experience if it’s blocked for too long.
A TBT of less than 200 milliseconds is considered good.
Cumulative Layout Shift
Cumulative layout shift (CLS) essentially measures the impact of layout shifts on your store. CLS is an important usability metric as large changes in layout during the loading process can affect the user experience of your store.
You want a CLS score of 0.1 or less which indicates your store’s layout is stable and isn’t disrupting for users.
Speed Index
Speed index (SI) is another performance metric that measures how fast content is visually shown during page load.The SI of your store is generally improved by addressing any issues impacting your page load speed.
A fast speed index is 1.3 seconds or less on desktop and 3.4 seconds or less on mobile.
Tips to Optimize Speed of Shopify Store
Now we’ve covered the key performance metrics you want to measure, let’s get straight into the 10 essential tips to optimise the speed of your shopify store.
1. Choose a Lightweight Theme
Our first tip is to choose a lightweight theme for your Shopify store.
Lightweight, streamlined themes generally have better performance as they don’t have needless bloat from excess features and are built with speed in mind. It can often take a lot of work reworking more feature-heavy themes to be fast and performant, so choosing a lightweight theme from the get go can save you a lot of time.
If you’re wondering which themes are fastest, check out our article - Discover the Fastest Shopify Themes to Transform Your Online Business
2. Optimize Images for Web
Our next tip for improving loading speed is to optimize your store’s images.
Optimizing your store’s images basically boils down to compressing them to be as small as possible - whilst maintaining quality, as well as resizing images to the appropriate dimensions for display on your store.
This means, if an image shown on your website is 200px x 200px, you don’t need to use a 5,000px x 5,000px resolution image. This dramatically increases the file size of the image which in turn, slows down the performance of your store.
To optimize images, you can either manually resize and compress images before uploading them to Shopify, or you can use a Shopify app to do so automatically. Here’s out detailed guide on image optimizers for Shopify.
3. Implement Lazy Loading Techniques
Another effective tip to boost your store’s performance is by using lazy loading for images and videos.
Lazy loading defers the loading of media assets until they’re actually needed—usually when the user scrolls to them. This helps reduce initial load time and improves performance.
That said, you should avoid lazy loading content that appears above the fold (what users see immediately after landing on the page), as it can delay rendering and hurt your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) score.
For everything below the fold, lazy loading is highly recommended to keep your pages lightweight and fast.
You can add lazy loading in Shopify either by modifying your theme’s code or using a third-party app.
👉 Check out our full guide on how to implement lazy loading the right way.
4. Limit the Use of Third-Party Apps
Another key step is to evaluate the third-party apps installed on your store.
Many Shopify apps inject additional scripts and code into your theme, which can slow down your site by increasing the number of HTTP requests and the overall page size.
That doesn’t mean you need to remove all apps—just be selective. Use only what’s essential, and consider custom-building specific features if it helps reduce theme bloat.
The right apps for your store will vary based on your business needs, so it’s smart to regularly audit your installed apps, removing any that are unused or not delivering real value.
5. Minimize Redirects and Broken Links
Minimizing redirects is another effective strategy to optimize your shopify store’s speed.
This doesn’t mean removing 301 redirects which you have in place for SEO, but rather making sure you’re not chaining multiple redirects in a row as this builds latency and slows down your site.
In addition to their performance impacts, redirects and broken links can also negatively impact user experience by causing delays and unneeded frustration.
6. Use Shopify’s Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Another important tip to optimize speed is making sure your assets are delivered through a CDN.
By default, most of your theme’s files are served via Shopify’s built-in, high-performance CDN. But if you’ve customized your theme or added new files, you’ll want to ensure those assets are also using the CDN to maintain fast load times.
You can do this by applying the asset_url filter when including scripts or styles—this ensures they’re pulled from Shopify’s CDN rather than loaded externally.
7. Clean Up Your Code
Our next tip is to clean up your theme’s code. This involves removing unused code, and refactoring existing code to be performant.
Removing unused code is crucial as excessive JS or CSS being loaded and processed by the browser can negatively impact your store’s speed.
Refactoring existing code is more important for stores with a lot of custom code added on top of their theme’s initial setup. You basically want to make your code as performance-oriented as possible by removing things like nested loops (loops inside of other loops) and combining repeated code used in multiple files to one place.
This is likely the most developer-involved step in optimizing your store’s speed, but based on our experience, it can also deliver some of the most significant performance improvements.
8. Minify JS and CSS Code
Next, you’re going to want to minify JS and CSS code. This may sound intimidating if you’re less technically experienced, however it can be really simple using an online tool like minifier.org.
Minifying JS and CSS code improves your loading speed, as it produces smaller files which can then be fetched and processed faster by the browser.
Minifying code also doesn’t change or interfere with the functionality of your store as it’s the same code simply written in a shorter, more precise manner.
For more details, check out our guide on How to Minify JavaScript and CSS in Shopify for Faster Load Times.
9. Delay & Defer Scripts
Something else you can try to optimise the speed of your store, is delaying and deferring scripts that are not needed right away.
This tip also requires adjusting your theme code, but it can be as simple as adding the defer attribute to script tags loaded in your theme codes. This basically means the scripts will get fetched later so they don’t block the main thread and hurt your TBT time.
10. Regularly Test Your Store Speed
Our final tip to optimise your store’s speed is to regularly test your store’s speed. As you’re making day to day changes to your store such as adding additional products, altering images or installing additional apps, you’re likely impacting your store’s speed without realising it.
The simple solution in our experience, is to regularly test your store’s speed so you can update and optimize your store as performance issues arise rather than creating a much bigger, more time-consuming job later down the road.
This doesn’t need to be done daily or weekly, you can generate a report monthly or even quarterly to regularly check things are still up to par.
Conclusion
Improving your Shopify store’s speed isn’t just about better performance scores—it’s about delivering a smoother experience that keeps visitors engaged and ready to buy. Even small tweaks can lead to noticeable gains in conversions, SEO, and overall customer satisfaction.
By taking a strategic, intentional approach to performance, you ensure that your store isn’t just good-looking—but fast, responsive, and built to sell.
Recap of Strategies
Here’s a quick rundown of the 10 essential tips we covered:
- Choose a Lightweight Theme
- Optimize Images for Web
- Implement Lazy Loading Techniques
- Limit the Use of Third-Party Apps
- Minimize Redirects and Broken Links
- Use Shopify’s Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Clean Up Your Code
- Minify JS and CSS Code
- Delay & Defer Scripts
- Regularly Test Your Store Speed
Next Steps for Store Owners
Start with a performance audit: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to identify your store’s biggest bottlenecks.
Make small, measurable changes: Tackle one tip at a time. Even gradual improvements stack up.
Work with a developer if needed: For code-heavy optimisations, a Shopify expert can help implement changes safely and efficiently.
Monitor performance regularly: Speed isn’t a one-time fix—it’s an ongoing process.
Want personalized help speeding up your Shopify store? Contact us or explore our performance-focused Shopify development services
