Shopify speed work that
shows up in the numbers
Core Web Vitals are a ranking signal and a conversion problem at the same time. We baseline your store, fix what is actually costing you, and hand back a before-and-after you can verify yourself.
We did this
to our own site first.
Every agency claims to build fast stores. Ours is measurable, and you can check it yourself right now — run PageSpeed Insights on this page. These are the before and after numbers from our own optimisation sprint.
Slow stores
lose money quietly.
Nobody emails you to say your site was too slow. They just leave, and the loss shows up as a conversion rate you assume is normal for your industry. Speed is one of the few ecommerce problems that is simultaneously a ranking factor, a conversion factor and completely fixable.
Google measures it, and ranks on it
Core Web Vitals — Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift — are part of how Google assesses page experience. Two stores with comparable content and links do not rank the same when one takes eleven seconds to show a product image.
South African conditions are harsher than the demo
Most themes are built and tested on fast connections in the northern hemisphere. Your customers are on mobile data, often on congested networks, sometimes on a phone that is three years old. A store that feels instant in a Cape Town office can be unusable on the N2.
The cost is paid on every single visit
A conversion problem in your checkout affects the people who reach checkout. A speed problem affects everyone who ever tries to load the store, including every visitor you paid for with ads.
What actually slows
a Shopify store down.
In our experience it is almost never the thing store owners expect. It is rarely Shopify, and it is rarely the theme on its own.
Apps you forgot you installed
The single most common culprit. Every app injects scripts, and uninstalling an app often leaves its code behind in the theme. We audit what is actually loading, not what the admin says is installed.
Images shipped at the wrong size
A 4,000-pixel product photograph served to a 400-pixel phone slot, in a format from 2005. Correct sizing, modern formats and proper lazy-loading is usually the biggest single win available — it was on our own site.
Third-party scripts loading before your content
Chat widgets, pixels, review embeds and font loaders that block rendering. Most of them do not need to run before your customer sees a product, and moving them is a configuration change rather than a rebuild.
Layout that shifts while it loads
Images without dimensions, banners that appear late, fonts that swap and reflow the page. It scores badly on CLS, and it is the reason customers tap the wrong thing and leave irritated.
Theme code doing too much work
Liquid loops over large collections, sliders carrying every product on the homepage, and JavaScript bundles loaded on pages that never use them.
Measure, fix,
measure again.
1. Baseline
We record your current mobile and desktop scores, Core Web Vitals, and the real field data Google holds on your store — not just a lab test. You get the numbers before we touch anything, so the improvement is verifiable rather than asserted.
2. Audit
Every request the store makes, ranked by what it costs you. This is where a QA and engineering background earns its keep — the goal is finding the three changes that matter, not producing a hundred-item list nobody actions.
3. Fix, in priority order
Images and media first, then render-blocking scripts, then theme code, then app cleanup. Each change tested against the baseline so we know what actually moved the number and what was noise.
4. Report
Before and after, per metric, with what was changed to get there. If a number did not move, we say so and explain why rather than burying it.
Not sure if speed is your problem? Send us your store URL — anywhere in the world, on Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce — and we will run the baseline and tell you honestly whether there is enough on the table to be worth paying for. Speed work is often bundled into a migration; if you are pricing a new build instead, our published bands are here.
Request a Speed Audit →Common Questions,
Straight Answers.
What is a good PageSpeed score for a Shopify store?
On mobile, anything above 70 is respectable for a real ecommerce store carrying images, apps and tracking; above 85 is strong. Chasing 100 is usually a waste of money — the last few points cost more than they return. What matters more is Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, because those reflect what a customer actually experiences.
Will speed optimisation break my store?
Not the way we do it. Work happens on a duplicated theme, every change is tested before it goes near your live store, and the live theme is only swapped once the numbers and the functionality both check out. You can roll back to the previous theme at any point.
How much faster can my store realistically get?
It depends entirely on what is wrong. Stores heavy with unoptimised images and abandoned app code often improve dramatically — our own site went from 69 to 90 on mobile and cut Largest Contentful Paint from 11.2 seconds to 3.0. A store that is already reasonably built might gain ten points. We run the baseline first so nobody is guessing.
Do I need to remove my apps?
Usually not all of them. We identify which apps are actually costing you load time versus which are earning their place, and we clean up leftover code from apps you already uninstalled — which is frequently a bigger win than removing anything you are currently using.
Does speed really affect sales, or just SEO?
Both, and the sales effect is the bigger one. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal, but the more direct cost is visitors abandoning before your first product image appears — including the paid visitors you spent money to bring.
Can you optimise a store you did not build?
Yes. Most speed work we do is on stores built by someone else. We do not need to have written the theme to fix it, and we will not use the audit as a pretext to sell you a rebuild you do not need.
Do you optimise stores on other platforms, or outside South Africa?
Yes to both. We work remotely with brands worldwide, and while Shopify is our deepest specialism we run the same baseline, audit, fix and report process on WooCommerce and BigCommerce stores.
Find out what your
store is costing you.
Send us your store URL and we will run a baseline against Google’s field data. If there is not enough on the table to justify the work, we will tell you that instead of selling you an audit.