What impact does the Online Store Speed Report have on small sites?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Shopify’s Online Store Speed Report automatically tests three pages (homepage, popular collection, and popular product) daily using Google’s developer tools from Council Bluffs, USA. This creates phantom traffic that appears in analytics.

Impact on Small Sites:

  • For high-traffic stores (3000+ daily visits), the 3 test visits represent only 0.1% of traffic
  • For smaller or new stores, these visits significantly distort analytics and conversion rate metrics
  • Some users report 50-400+ daily visits from Council Bluffs, severely skewing statistics

Key Issues:

  • Traffic appears as “direct” visits, making filtering difficult
  • Google Analytics doesn’t record these bot sessions (they lack JavaScript)
  • Bot protection doesn’t filter them since they originate from Shopify
  • No control over testing frequency or ability to disable the feature

Current Status:

  • Problem persists from initial 2019 report through 2025
  • Shopify Support acknowledged the issue and added it to the development list
  • Contacting support yields no solution; they claim inability to control test frequency
  • Users can exclude these visits in reporting if they identify the pattern

Requested Solution:
Store owners want manual control over testing frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, annually, or off).

Summarized with AI on October 29. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
2

I have raised this issue with Shopify support, they have done some testing and managed to replicate my results.

They agree that this is an issue and have put it on the development list.

Make sure you reach out to Shopify and let them know if this affects you and how you would like the speed test to work for you in the future.

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