15 Quick Wins to Speed Up Your Shopify Site Today

Your Shopify store is slow. You know it. Your customers know it. Google definitely knows it. Every second of delay costs you conversions, rankings, and revenue. The good news? Most speed problems have fast fixes. Here are 15 things you can do right now, listed in order of impact, to make your store noticeably faster.

Why You Need to Fix This Now

A one-second delay in load time drops conversions by 7%. For a store doing $50,000 per month, that is $3,500 gone. Google also uses page speed as a ranking factor, so a slow store means fewer people finding you in the first place. Mobile shoppers are even less patient. Over half of them will leave if your site takes more than three seconds to load.

You probably already know you have a speed problem. The Shopify admin dashboard shows a speed score, and most stores sit between 20 and 40 out of 100. That is not great. But instead of a massive overhaul, let us focus on quick wins. These are changes you can make today, most in under 30 minutes, that will move the needle immediately.

Before you start, run your store through Google PageSpeed Insights and screenshot your score. You will want to compare after making these changes.

The 15 Quick Wins (In Order of Impact)

1. Audit and Remove Unused Apps

This is the single biggest speed improvement most store owners can make. Every installed app injects JavaScript into your store, even if you are not actively using it. Go to your Shopify admin, open the Apps section, and uninstall anything you have not used in the last 30 days. Some merchants discover they have 15+ apps installed when they only need 5 or 6.

After uninstalling, check your theme code for leftover snippets. Some apps leave behind code fragments that continue loading even after the app is removed. Look in your theme's snippets folder for files named after apps you no longer use and delete them.

2. Compress All Images

Images are usually the largest files on any page, and uncompressed product photos can weigh 2 to 5 MB each. Run every image through a compression tool like TinyPNG or Squoosh before uploading. Aim for product images under 200 KB and hero images under 500 KB. This single step can cut your total page weight in half.

Do not forget about collection images, blog post images, and any lifestyle photos on your homepage. These are often overlooked but contribute just as much to slow load times as product photos.

3. Use WebP Format

WebP images are 25 to 35% smaller than PNG or JPEG at the same quality. Shopify automatically serves WebP versions of images uploaded through the admin, but only if the original image was uploaded at a reasonable size. If you are using custom code or a page builder that bypasses Shopify's CDN, convert your images to WebP manually using a free tool like Convertio or CloudConvert.

Check your theme's image tags to make sure they include the format: 'pjpg' or rely on Shopify's automatic format negotiation. If you see hardcoded .png or .jpg extensions in your Liquid templates, those images are not being served in WebP.

4. Remove Hero Video or Replace With an Image

Hero videos look great, but they are performance killers. A single autoplay video can add 5 to 15 MB to your initial page load. Replace it with a high-quality compressed image and your homepage will load dramatically faster. If you absolutely must keep video, host it on YouTube or Vimeo and load it only after user interaction, never on autoplay.

The visual impact of a well-chosen static image with good typography is nearly identical to a looping video. Your customers care more about a page that loads instantly than a fancy background clip that stutters on their phone.

5. Reduce Homepage Sections

Every section on your homepage adds HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images that the browser needs to parse and render. If your homepage has 12+ sections, consider cutting it down to 6 or 7 of the most impactful ones. Keep your hero, a featured collection, social proof, and a CTA. Remove the rest.

This does not mean deleting content permanently. Move less critical sections to dedicated landing pages where they can load independently. A focused homepage with fewer sections will always outperform a bloated one, both in speed and conversions.

6. Defer Third-Party Scripts

Chat widgets, analytics tools, review platforms, and marketing pixels all load JavaScript that competes with your core content for bandwidth. Add the defer or async attribute to any third-party script tags in your theme. For chat widgets specifically, delay loading until the user scrolls or clicks, not on initial page load.

A simple approach is to wrap non-essential scripts in a setTimeout that delays them by 3 to 5 seconds. Your visitor will never notice the chat icon appearing a few seconds late, but they will notice that the page itself loaded faster.

7. Remove Unused Theme Features

Most Shopify themes ship with features you will never use: mega menus, product quickview modals, animated carousels, parallax scrolling, and more. Each one loads CSS and JavaScript whether you have enabled it or not. Go into your theme settings and disable every feature you are not using. If your theme allows it, remove the corresponding code entirely.

Pay special attention to sliders and carousels. These are among the heaviest components in any theme, and studies consistently show they do not improve conversions. A static featured image will load faster and convert better than a rotating carousel.

8. Minimize Custom Fonts

Every custom font file adds 20 to 100 KB to your page load, and most stores load multiple weights (regular, bold, italic) for multiple font families. Stick to two fonts maximum: one for headings, one for body text. Load only the weights you actually use. If possible, use system fonts for body text since they require zero additional downloads.

If you must use custom fonts, make sure they are served in WOFF2 format (the most compressed option) and that your theme uses font-display: swap so text appears immediately with a fallback font while the custom font loads in the background.

9. Enable Lazy Loading

Lazy loading tells the browser to only load images when they are about to scroll into view, instead of loading everything at once. Most modern Shopify themes have this built in, but it is often disabled by default. Check your theme settings for a "lazy loading" toggle and turn it on. This is especially impactful for collection pages and long homepages with many images.

Make sure your above-the-fold hero image is NOT lazy loaded. You want that one to load immediately. Only images below the fold should be deferred. If your theme does not distinguish between the two, you may need to adjust the code manually.

10. Optimize Liquid Code

Inefficient Liquid code is a hidden speed killer. Common problems include nested for-loops that iterate over large collections, excessive use of include instead of render (which is faster because it creates a new scope), and repeated database calls that could be assigned to a variable once. If you or a developer have customized your theme's Liquid, review those changes for performance issues.

A quick win here is to replace any {% include %} tags with {% render %} throughout your theme. Shopify recommends this change and it can improve server-side rendering times measurably.

11. Remove Inline CSS and JavaScript

Large blocks of inline CSS and JavaScript in your Liquid templates increase your HTML document size and prevent the browser from caching those assets. Move any inline styles larger than a few lines into external stylesheets, and move inline scripts into external JavaScript files. External files get cached by the browser, so returning visitors do not need to download them again.

The exception is critical CSS for above-the-fold content, which should remain inline for fastest initial render. Everything else belongs in external, cacheable files.

12. Reduce Collection Page Products Per Page

If your collection pages display 48 or 64 products at once, each page load is fetching dozens of product images, titles, prices, and variant data. Reduce the products per page to 16 or 24 and add pagination. This makes each page load significantly faster while still letting customers browse your full catalog.

Infinite scroll can work well here if implemented correctly with lazy loading. Just make sure the initial load only renders 16 to 24 products and additional batches load as the user scrolls.

13. Minimize Redirects

Every redirect adds a full round-trip to the server before the page even starts loading. Common culprits include redirects from non-www to www (or vice versa), redirects from old product URLs after renaming, and redirects from HTTP to HTTPS. Check your Shopify admin under Online Store > Navigation > URL Redirects and clean up any that are no longer needed.

Also check for redirect chains where one redirect points to another redirect. These compound the delay. Each hop should go directly to the final destination.

14. Use a Faster Theme

Sometimes the best optimization is starting fresh. If your current theme is old, bloated, or heavily customized with years of accumulated code, switching to a modern, performance-focused theme can give you a bigger speed boost than any other single change. Look for themes built with clean, minimal code that score 70+ on PageSpeed out of the box.

The Shopify Theme Store now shows performance ratings for each theme. Use that as a starting filter. Alternatively, a purpose-built theme generated specifically for your store can eliminate all the unused code that comes with one-size-fits-all themes.

15. Test on Real Devices

Your store might look fast on your MacBook Pro with gigabit Wi-Fi, but that is not how most of your customers experience it. Test on a mid-range Android phone on a 4G connection. That is the reality for a large portion of online shoppers. Use Chrome DevTools to throttle your connection to "Slow 3G" and see what your customers actually see.

Make this a habit: every time you make changes to your store, pull out your phone and load the site on mobile data. If it feels slow to you, it feels even slower to someone with an older device.

The Priority Cheat Sheet

If you are short on time, focus on the top five: remove unused apps, compress images, switch to WebP, kill hero videos, and cut homepage sections. These five changes alone can improve your PageSpeed score by 20 to 30 points and shave 2 to 4 seconds off your load time.

After that, work through items 6 through 10 over the next week. Save the remaining five for when you have a spare afternoon. The key is to start now. Every day your store runs slow is a day you are losing sales.

What to Expect After Optimizing

After implementing these 15 fixes, most stores see their PageSpeed score jump from the 20 to 40 range up to 60 to 80. Mobile load times typically drop from 6 to 8 seconds down to 2 to 3 seconds. That is the difference between a customer bouncing and a customer buying.

You should also see improvements in your Google search rankings within a few weeks, since Google re-crawls and re-evaluates page speed regularly. Faster pages mean better Core Web Vitals scores, which means better visibility in search results.

Or Skip the Optimization Entirely

Here is the truth: optimizing a slow theme is a lot of work, and the results are limited by the theme's foundation. If your theme was not built for speed from the start, there is only so much you can squeeze out of it.

That is why more merchants are choosing to start with a fast theme from day one. Clyro builds custom Shopify themes that are performance-optimized by default. No bloated code, no unused features, no guesswork. Just a clean, fast store designed specifically for your brand and built to convert.

Instead of spending a weekend chasing speed fixes, you can launch with a store that scores 90+ on PageSpeed out of the box. Try Clyro free and see the difference a fast foundation makes.