- Has Shopify observed any measurable performance impacts (positive or negative) across merchants adopting Combined Listings at scale?
- Are there any planned improvements or guidance for mitigating performance issues tied to the Section Rendering API, especially on high-variant PDPs?
- Will Block ID or Theme Blocks based rendering on the road map ?
- What internal benchmarks does Shopify use to evaluate acceptable storefront performance across different merchant sizes or verticals? (Example, the theme performance in shopify says “good”, but lighthouse and core web vitals are failing)
- With INP becoming a Core Web Vital, what steps is Shopify taking to improve or give merchants more visibility into interaction latency issues?
- Are there any plans to release more concrete developer guidelines or tools for tracking real-world performance (beyond Lighthouse/CWV scores)?
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Hi!
Those are some interesting and exciting questions. I’ll do my best to answer as much as I can.
Has Shopify observed any measurable performance impacts (positive or negative) across merchants adopting Combined Listings at scale?
We don’t have metrics aggregated by the usage of Combined Listings, but it would be interesting to investigate. At the same time we didn’t get any negative signals so far.
I’m guessing the main concern would be server response times for collection and product pages. Are there any other scenarios that were a challenge when it comes to performance for you?
Are there any planned improvements or guidance for mitigating performance issues tied to the Section Rendering API, especially on high-variant PDPs? Will Block ID or Theme Blocks based rendering on the road map?
I can see two areas where using Section Rendering API may be problematic. The first one has to do with waiting for the actual response before injecting the new content. Here using the Shopify Theme Inspector to make sure a particular section renders fast should help. The Liquid team also keeps optimising its implementation filter by filter to squeeze as much performance of the language as possible.
The second one will be about everything that happens when the new content gets injected. This will be specific to the actual implementation and the amount of different scripts listening to the page events. Here I think I can recommend the general guide on optimising the INP as it explains how to prioritise visual changes over other less essential logic.
With the block stuff I’m not able to confirm anything as I don’t know, but all of the potential new features will be announced during the upcoming Editions.
What internal benchmarks does Shopify use to evaluate acceptable storefront performance across different merchant sizes or verticals?
We collect performance data from the actual visitors and show it to merchants in the dashboard in the admin. It uses standard Core Web Vitals thresholds for everybody, but he data may differ from CrUX. We collect information from all of the browsers that support specific performance metrics (not just Chrome) and do some additional work to filter out garbage traffic.
With INP becoming a Core Web Vital, what steps is Shopify taking to improve or give merchants more visibility into interaction latency issues?>
Merchants can see their INP in the performance dashboard I mentioned above. We’re working on some enhancements to it so it’s easier to figure out where the issues actually are. At the same time, we reach out to partners when we notice specific INP issues with their apps and/or themes to make sure the whole ecosystem gets better.
Are there any plans to release more concrete developer guidelines or tools for tracking real-world performance (beyond Lighthouse/CWV scores)?>
Yes, we’ve expanded our team this year to have a bit more time to work on additional guides on https://performance.shopify.com/. If you have any specific topics you would like us to dive into, please let me know!