Is a 47% speed score a concern for my online store?

[GLS3]

Hello everyone,

Recently I had hired a designer to improve the design and functionality of my shop.  I was happy overall but released that my store 'speed' has dropped about 10% to 47% which is slower than similar stores according to shopify.  I have reached out to my designer who can not find the issue and is insisting it is a elfsight review widget I had  created on for a few months before he had re-worked my store theme, and had not slowed the store down at that stage. I use the widget because the product app is doesn't for my store as I have many on-off products. 

Should I be worried about a speed of 47%.  He has been paid and although stating he wants to leave the store running as well as it was before his work, he is not really focused on the issue.

Some perspective and similar experience in this area would be really appreciated.

Thank you.

[SwiftfromOC]

Hi @GLS3 ,

The speed performance of 43% is considered as low performance and it happens frequently on many sites due to the following reasons:

1. Your new designs have heavy elements slowing down your speed. Heavy elements here can be large banner images, GIFs, videos, etc. In this case, you will have to do lazy load technique to optimize these elements loading.

2. Your installed third-party apps Javascript may affect your website loading, especially apps supporting front-end features like review widget, etc

3. You may change your theme recently and the new theme structure is too heavy for your loading speed.

To understand more details about what makes your site slow, you can try running your site on Google PageSpeed Insights at https://pagespeed.web.dev/ to have more ideas about that.

In case you are not tech-savvy, you can contact us or install our Swift app at https://apps.shopify.com/swift and our Support team will help you analyze your website in details.

I hope this can help.

[MichelleZach]

A 47% speed score is something worth exploring, as it has implications on sales and customer experience. Because your designer is uncertain, you might want to experiment with thecarbonfootprint.ai it reports on speed and carbon footprint, and may be able to point out what is slowing it down other than the widget.