How to tackle inconsistent store speed and large image file size?

[Jherr9788]

Hi everyone! I’ve been having issues with my store speed (I don’t think it’s slow) but it drastically increases and decreases every day. An issue I’m finding is large image file size, I use an app for optimization but I still have the same issue. Does anyone have any advice on what to do? Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Hi @Jherr9788 

Welcome to Shopify Community.

Aibek is here from Speedimize.io agency. 

I think our article will be useful in your situation. Take a look here: https://speedimize.io/blog/speed-store-improvement 

If you can share with us the URL of your shop, we can provide you a full analysis of your store and find your issues and why this is happening. 

Hope we can find a solution. 

Also, if you are a newbie with all this TBT, LCP, and other terms in PageSpeed, take a look at our simple guide here: https://speedimize.io/uploads/pagespeed_speeddimize.pdf 

[Jherr9788]

sweetestthingboutique.com

[Anonymous]

Hi @Jherr9788 

Thanks for sharing with us your URL. 

We fully agree with @JoesIdeas  about the drastic changes in valuation.

I hope you are aware that the rating of the Online store speed report takes the average value of 3 pages: the main page, the collection, and the product with the most traffic in 7 days. You should take into account that one of the pages(we believe that the product page) may have a lot of traffic and actively sell your products. Shopify itself can withstand heavy loads, of course, the probability is low, but you can not say this about apps. And with a lot of traffic, the requests of one of the apps are executed for a long time, which greatly affects the rating. This is our guess, we will need to study the apps and compare how much the response comes from the server of a particular app. Then analyze the result.

We are more than sure that the instability of the speed ratings is related to the apps.

[JoesIdeas]

@Jherr9788 the easiest way to see if you have any optimization issues is to run your site through the Shopify Analyzer - that's a free tool my team built for the community. It's geared specifically for Shopify sites, and gives a score based on benchmarks we've gathered from over 1,000 Shopify sites we've analyzed.

You mentioned your speed "drastically increases and decreases every day". The solution for this will depend on where you're getting your data. If you're seeing a large change every day with webpagetest.org (the most reliable speed tester we've found), then there may be a problem with your apps. If you're referencing Google PSI, the score fluctuates a lot with that tool, and can even change from run to run in the same day.

[Jherr9788]

Hi! Thanks for a quick response, I just ran a test with the link you provided me and I had a better score than I thought I would! I spoke to someone from your team already and they suggested a few tips but I would like to uninstall the SEO app I’m currently using as I feel that the may be a reason for a slow speed, if I remove the app I’m worried that my site will be very slow. What do you suggest I do?

[JoesIdeas]

@Jherr9788 an SEO app shouldn't affect your performance but whenever uninstalling apps I recommend:

1) Backup your theme in case something goes wrong.

2) Delete the app.

3) If you do not receive an email from the app developer with uninstall instructions (should send out within a couple minutes), contact them and ask if there is anything you need to do to remove any app code added from their app.

4) Remove the code on the backup theme, preview before publishing to make sure all looks good, then publish.