Update to App Store ‘Speed Tested’ Highlight

[Jacqui]

Merchants need their apps to be fast so they have minimal impact on their storefronts. To ensure merchants know if their store will be impacted best, the ‘Speed Tested’ highlight has been updated for Shopify App Store listings to more accurately reflect app speed.

What’s changed?

The Speed Test highlight will now only include the most recent 50 installations. The ‘Speed Tested’ highlight was previously awarded based on all installations of an app. This had two related issues. First, if an app’s performance has improved (or worsened) over time, the all-time average won’t reflect the most accurate info to merchants. Second, if a partner improves their app, it may take a long time for their improvements to be reflected in the all-time average.

We now use a rolling average across your most recent installations to ensure we reflect your app's current performance to merchants as they browse apps. As you improve your app's performance and merchants install it, our assessment will reflect that improvement back to merchants.

What can you do as a developer to improve app speed? 

Shopify.dev describes many best practices for improving performance, including using Theme App Extensions if applicable, avoiding parser-blocker scripts, hosting assets on Shopify servers, reducing JavaScript usage, and just-in-time resource loading.

Google also provides additional general recommendations in the context of how Lighthouse evaluates performance.