App Events are now included in the merchant online store speed report

[TyW]

With BFCM coming-up and buyers rushing to snag deals, page load speed for shops is more important than ever. Merchants need to have more information on what factors may be impacting their store speed, and in helping them track and optimize performance, we’ve added app install and uninstall events to the new “speed score over time” section of the online store speed report in the merchant admin.

With this update, merchants will be assured that installing your app is not slowing down their store. In the event that your app is slowing their store, they can work with you to have these issues resolved.

These updates to the online store speed report will be rolling out over the next week.

What can app developers do to help with online store speed?

To get a sense of how your app may impact store performance, we recommend that you install your app on your test stores to see the effect on store performance for yourself. You can use the online store speed score, the theme inspector, or many other third party tools to measure the impact.

To help ensure your app does not slow down merchants’ stores, some best practices include:

• Keep assets (Liquid, CSS, JS, Fonts) and number of requests to an absolute minimum. The fastest request is the one not made!
• Defer loading non-critical assets until the page load event or until a customer interacts with your feature.
• Use the ScriptTags API over the Assets API wherever possible.
• Avoid loading assets that already exist on a page, eg. check if window.jQuery is defined before requesting a jQuery library.
• Make it easy for merchants to reverse edits made by the Assets API. Provide an uninstall guide to make sure merchants are able to completely remove all traces of your app.
• Make sure that your app integrations don’t include duplicate code if included on a page multiple times.
• Test and monitor the impact on performance your app has via a development store and the online store speed report.

In addition to testing your app and cleaning your code, we encourage you to keep an eye out for app sections and snippets in the coming months.