Speed up your Shopify store
Measure, clean up, measure again: winning back speed without losing features.
Speeding up a Shopify store almost always starts with three culprits: too many apps, a bloated theme and oversized images. Shopify itself is fast; the servers and the platform are rarely the problem. What slows a store down is everything that has been piled on top over the years.
Zalm Partners finds that pile and clears it, with a measurement before and after, so you have the difference in writing. We are a Shopify agency that builds in-house: we fix the cause in the code instead of covering it with a caching app.
Where the slowness comes from
The biggest offender is nearly always JavaScript from apps. Every app that displays something on your store ships its own scripts on every page, including pages where the app does nothing. What few store owners realise: apps you uninstall often leave their code behind in the theme. In the stores we audit we regularly find scripts from apps cancelled months earlier, still loading for every single visitor.
Then come the theme and the media. Many themes are built to impress in every demo and drag along features you will never use. Images tend to go in exactly as they came out of the camera, thousands of pixels wide for a slot of three hundred. Each of these choices costs tenths of a second, and tenths add up.
What speed buys you: conversion and AI visibility
Speed is not an engineering hobby but a revenue lever. Every second between click and visible page costs you visitors, and mobile weighs heaviest: the network is flaky there and patience is shortest. A store that feels quick on a phone keeps more people all the way to checkout.
Less known is the second effect: crawlers. Google uses page speed as a signal, and AI search engines fetch your pages when they assemble answers. A slow, script-heavy page gets read less often and less completely, and what does not get read does not get cited. Speed is therefore a precondition for visibility in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, not just for a nice Lighthouse score. How that interacts with the rest of your store's optimisation is covered under Shopify SEO.
Wondering what this means for your site?
Ask usOur method: measure, clean up, measure again
We start with a measurement of your key templates, on mobile and desktop, so it is established where the time goes. Only then do we start clearing, in order of impact.
- App audit: which apps you actually use, and what they load
- Removing leftover scripts of uninstalled apps from the theme
- Cleaning the theme or switching off unused features
- Compressing images and serving them in modern formats
- Re-measuring per template, set side by side with the first measurement
Where possible we replace an app with a small piece of theme code that carries no subscription. Everything we remove is put to you first: you know what an app was once meant to do, we see what it costs.
What does speeding up a Shopify store cost?
It depends on the state of the store: the number of installed and once-removed apps, the quality of the theme, how much custom work is woven through it, and the size of your media library. A store with eight apps and a tidy theme is cleaned up faster than one with forty apps and six years of stacked modifications.
After a first conversation we dig into your store, so you see the size of the job before anything is committed. You then receive a proposal with a fixed price for the clean-up and the expected speed gain per template. You decide on numbers, not on gut feeling.
Frequently asked questions
That differs per store, which is why we never promise a number up front. The first measurement shows where the time currently goes; from that follows a realistic estimate per template. Stores carrying a lot of app ballast usually have the most headroom, precisely because there is so much to remove.
No, that is the agreement. We only remove what is demonstrably unused, and for apps that do earn their place we first look for a lighter alternative, often a small theme adjustment. Every change is put to you beforehand and can be rolled back.
Usually not. Cleaning up often gains enough to postpone or avoid replacement. Only with themes that have been rebuilt by different parties over the years can starting fresh be cheaper than repairing; if so, the proposal shows both routes with the numbers attached.
Yes. Page speed is a ranking signal in Google and determines how many pages crawlers fetch per visit. AI search engines also read your pages to build their answers; a slow page full of scripts gets read poorly there. Speed pays off in Google, in ChatGPT and in your conversion rate at the same time.
Partly, yes: removing unused apps and compressing images is something anyone can do, and we encourage it. The hard part is inside the theme: recognising and safely removing leftover scripts takes code knowledge, because one wrong cut can hit the checkout. That part we handle, with a backup made first.
An intro call is usually scheduled within days, and the clean-up typically starts two to three weeks after sign-off. Leave your store URL in the form below; we reply within one working day.
Related pages
Curious how much faster your store can be?
Describe where your store feels slow, especially on mobile. We dig into your apps, theme and templates and come back with insights and a concrete plan with next steps. We reply within one working day.