How to optimize your Shopify store’s speed

A slow Shopify website can negatively affect the user experience and increase bounce rates, which can hold you back from potential sales and reduce conversions. While Shopify manages hosting and server performance, your store’s speed can still depend on the theme you use, the number of apps on your store, and third-party code, including your tags.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the best Shopify speed optimization practices, including how to optimize your theme, manage apps, and more.

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Speed optimization aspects Shopify takes care of

Shopify is a hosted eCommerce platform, meaning it takes care of server setup and maintenance and back-end performance optimizations. Here’s what Shopify handles automatically:

• Servers. Shopify hosts your store on global servers that are optimized for speed. All Shopify plans don’t have bandwidth limitations.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN). All Shopify stores come with a CDN by Cloudflare. Instead of loading your website from one server in a specific location, a CDN stores cached site copies on different servers and loads the one that’s closest to your visitor.
• Browser caching. Shopify uses browser caching for one year, meaning that returning site visitors will experience faster loading times.
• Image optimization. Shopify serves the WebP image format automatically. It’s a format developed by Google that offers around 25-34% smaller file sizes compared to JPG or PNG files at a similar quality.

Why is a fast Shopify website important?

Shopify website speed can directly affect your traffic and conversion rates, among other areas. That’s because slow loading times can cause a poor user experience. As a result, users leave your site, and the bounce rates increase.

Slow website performance also affects sales. According to a report by Akamai, each passing second in page load time can lower conversion rates by around 20% on average.

Plus, poor performance can also have a negative impact on SEO & AEO. Many search engines and AI systems still consider speed in terms of ranking or using a website in generated answers. For example, mobile speed has been a ranking factor on Google since 2018.

How to optimize Shopify store speed?

Shopify speed depends on how well you optimize your site’s resources. Here are the key optimization practices you should adopt:

• Use a fast theme
• Remove unnecessary apps and third-party tools
• Compress images
• Reduce the size of oversized images
• Use static images instead of GIFs
• Enable lazy loading
• Use Google Tag Manager
• Audit your tag manager
• Review PageSpeed Insights suggestions
• Minify your code files

1. Use a fast theme

Your Shopify store’s theme is one of the biggest factors that affect website speed. Shopify themes on the theme store are all up-to-date and optimized for performance, as proven by Shopify theme performance data.

However, if you opt for third-party themes, consider options that come with a free testing period. We’ve seen themes that offer dozens of features but overlook the fact that they sacrifice performance.

During my own fastest theme tests, I found that the fastest desktop load time was offered by Blum (0.5s), Dawn (0.6s), and Electro (0.7s).

However, even the fastest themes can slow down your store depending on how you customize them.

Make sure to use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to monitor your store’s performance before and after making huge changes, like enabling animations or adding multiple additional sections.

Plus, if you have a large product catalog, consider using pagination on collection pages. It can help improve both the page load time and the user experience.

2. Remove unnecessary apps and third-party tools

When you install apps from the Shopify App Store, they add scripts to your store. With time, they can accumulate and cause a slow loading speed.

Instead, look for all-in-one apps that offer a comprehensive list of features in a single Shopify app. It doesn’t just help you maintain fast speeds – it also helps save money and prevent feature overlap.

Make sure you also review the apps you don’t need and uninstall them. Here’s how:

Go to Shopify Admin > Settings > Apps > More (three dots) > Uninstall.

3. Remove leftover app code

Sometimes, uninstalling an app may not be enough. In the past, we’ve detected leftover codes from many apps that alter your theme.liquid file, snippets, or assets, overloading your files even after the app is removed.

You can fix this by checking your theme files for any unused code related to the apps you’ve uninstalled. It can be the theme.liquid, header.liquid, or other specific files in your store’s code.

If you don’t have experience with coding, we highly recommend that you either leave code management to a developer. Alternatively, contact the support of the app you’ve deleted and ask to remove leftover code.

4. Compress images

Image compression is the process of reducing the file size of images without significantly affecting their quality. According to Web Almanac tests, images take up around 22% of total page weight in 2025, which means they can impact performance.

Shopify applies basic compression to the images you upload to your store, but we found that it can still be optimized even further without sacrificing quality. If PageSpeed Insights or other tools show that your images are too large, the first step is to compress them.

You can compress images using any free online compression tool. We had great experiences with tools like iLoveIMG, TinyIMG, or Image Compressor. Alternatively, you can install Shopify apps that automatically compress images daily.

It’s also important to use the right image format. PNGs and JPGs are still commonly used formats, but we find that WebP is best for maintaining great speeds. WebP offers the smallest file size at a similar quality to JPG and PNG.

5. Reduce the size of oversized images

If you use multiple large and high-quality background images on your store, they may drastically affect your Core Web Vitals data.

According to Shopify, the maximum image size is 5000 x 5000 pixels (up to 20 MB), but the exact size depends on the use case. That’s why we’ve prepared a Shopify image size recommendation guide to find the best practices for different cases.

6. Use static images instead of GIFs

GIFs are short animations that can be used to show product features or functionality, but you shouldn’t overuse them when prioritizing speed. While they can help grab the user’s attention, they’re much larger than other image formats.

For example, here’s how the size of a GIF compares to WebP on one of our blog posts:

The GIF size is around 3 to 14 times bigger than the size of WebP images on the same page. Even the loading time is around 49 ms to 100 ms slower than that of the WebP images.

We’re not saying you should completely give up GIFs, but make sure you don’t use too many to affect website performance.

7. Enable lazy loading

Lazy loading delays the loading of non-essential resources, such as images or videos, until they appear in the user’s visible screen area. It helps boost the initial page load time, so only the essential parts of your page are loaded.

We always help our clients set up lazy loading because it’s an easy change to improve the user experience. As the visitor scrolls the page, the images start loading and appear high-quality once the user views them.

Many Shopify themes already support lazy loading, so review if the setting is already applied. We’ve also prepared a Shopify lazy loading guide for merchants who want to learn how to enable it themselves.

8. Use Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager allows you to store tracking codes, like Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel, without coding. It makes it simple to manage scripts that otherwise would be hard-coded into your theme and could cause unnecessary loading or conflicts.

You can migrate tracking codes into Google Tag Manager following this guide:

1. Review existing trackers on your Shopify store and decide which ones to migrate.
2. Set up a Google Tag Manager account and install it on your website using Custom pixels.
3. Migrate the tags you want.
4. After you migrate the tags, delete the old code to avoid duplicates.
5. Preview your tags before publishing and use the debug mode to locate issues.

If you haven’t dealt with coding, we highly suggest that you consult a developer to help you with this step. You can also review the full guide on how to migrate tracking codes to Tag Manager by Google Developers.

9. Audit your tag manager

If you’re already using a tag manager, it’s important to regularly review it. While tag managers like Google Tag Manager make it simple to add tracking scripts, the unused tags, duplicate scripts, or tags that fire on every page unnecessarily can accumulate.

We see that the Shopify stores we audit often overlook this optimization practice and don’t regularly audit tags, which can slow down the loading speed.

Look through the best tag manager practices recommended by Google’s developers and try keeping it clean so that only essential scripts load when needed.

10. Review PageSpeed Insights suggestions

Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool for testing your site’s speed on desktop and mobile devices. It gives you Core Web Vitals metrics, which are based on real user experience, and personalized insights on how to improve them.

Here are the key Core Web Vitals metrics you should focus on:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – monitors the page load time (ideally under 2.5 seconds).
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – measures responsiveness (ideally 200 milliseconds or below).
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – measures the visual stability (ideally 0.1 or less)

These metrics will give you a general idea of how your website performs. Review the diagnostics part to see what causes poor performance on your site.

11. Minify your code files

When you run your website through PageSpeed Insights, it may show diagnostics like “Reduce unused CSS” or “Minify JavaScript.” It means that your CSS and JavaScript files include unnecessary characters or developer comments that make them bigger than they need to be.

Removing redundant code that doesn’t affect functionality is a process known as minification. You can easily minify your code for free with online minifiers. For example, we tested that Toptal and Minifier.org work great.

If you need an automated solution, you can use a Shopify app for minification. However, look for options that offer more speed-oriented features.

How to test your Shopify store’s speed

When you go to Shopify Admin > Online store > Themes, you’ll find that Shopify gives you a web performance report with performance metrics in the last 30 days.

It’s a convenient method to track performance straight from Shopify. However, if you’re looking to improve your website speed, we still recommend using Google PageSpeed Insights.

Shopify’s web performance report doesn’t give you diagnostics about your pages, so you can’t check what exactly needs improving. Meanwhile, PageSpeed Insights gives you specific issues to solve to maintain fast store speeds.

Real testing: Shopify store performance in April 2026

It’s one thing to optimize your store, but it’s another to know what results you should be aiming for. That’s why we used domains of 40+ Shopify stores and ran all of them through PageSpeed Insights.

We calculated the average scores and the results of the top and bottom 20 stores in terms of performance. Here are the results:

The top performing stores showed an LCP of only 1.2s, INP of 59.6ms, and CLS of 0.004, which all fall into the ideal range. The average scores also fall into the excellent result category, while the bottom 20 stores could use optimizing performance for a better user experience.

Final thoughts

Shopify gives you a powerful and fast foundation to work with thanks to being a hosted platform and offering a CDN and browser caching. However, fast store speeds depend on how well you optimize your website, including the theme, apps, and third-party scripts.

If you want to automate speed optimization without coding, our TinyIMG Shopify app can help. It offers automatic image compression and resizing, one-click lazy loading setup, easy CSS/JS minification, and no-code third-party script management.

Make sure you regularly run your store through PageSpeed Insights, review the diagnostics, and follow the best optimization practices to maintain a fast performance. 

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About the author

Kristina Jaruseviciute

Kristina is a Senior Writer at TinyIMG responsible for informing and educating readers on all things Shopify-related. In her writings, she covers a broad range of topics, from the best apps and themes for Shopify merchants to tips on how to optimize your website for SEO, performance, and higher conversion rates.