Have I been scammed by fake performance experts?

Shopify Discussion

Topic summary

A Shopify store owner discovered their site may have been compromised by a Fiverr “performance expert” who injected deceptive code to artificially inflate PageSpeed scores.

The Scam Mechanics:

  • Hidden code in snippets/meta-tags.liquid detects Google PageSpeed tests and serves different content
  • Uses document.open() to check if visitor is PageSpeed (Linux x86_64) and displays a fake optimized image
  • Loads external JavaScript from uncontrolled CDN sources (other shops’ files)
  • Delays legitimate scripts and modifies page rendering to game metrics

Real-World Impact:

  • PageSpeed scores appeared excellent, but actual Core Web Vitals remained poor
  • Search Console impressions and clicks dropped 50% after “optimization”
  • Code creates discrepancies between test tools and real user experience

Technical Issues Identified:

  • External dependencies (critical-resources.js, globo1.js) already unavailable
  • Code hidden in unexpected locations (meta-tags snippet, not performance files)
  • Potential Google penalty risk for cloaking (serving different content to bots vs. users)

Resolution Steps:

  • Remove injected code from meta-tags.liquid and footer references
  • Revert to original theme version
  • Implement legitimate optimizations like image preloading for LCP/FCP improvements

Community Consensus: This represents a known scam pattern. Multiple users reported similar experiences with fake performance experts using cloaking techniques that harm SEO while appearing to improve metrics.

Summarized with AI on November 4. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
7

Desktop is even better with original theme, but on mobile original theme loses because “Total blocking time” is better on modified because a lot of JS code is not run until user interaction. And this is also a reason for “Cumulative Layout Shift” as many elements are added by JS (like chat icon) and, importantly, the product image is not loaded because modification makes it “super-lazy”.

Yes, you can probably just remove this code and this line is placed above footer code:

Can’t be 100% there are no other mods, that’s why I suggested to re-publish the theme version you had before optimization.

The problem with this kind of optimisation is that they trick the PageSpeed site, but actual data used by Google for SERP comes from the end-users actual experiences submitted by millions of Chromes deployed around.

All CLS and TBT suppressed by this trick will re-surface as soon as these customers will start interacting with the site.

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