How to Speed Up a Shopify Website in 2026: 6 Easy Steps

Key Insights
• Speeding up a Shopify store comes down to six steps, done in order, most of which take under an hour each.
• Testing your speed before changing anything is the step almost everyone skips, and it’s the only way to know if a later fix actually worked.
• Removing unused apps is usually the single fastest fix, often worth 10 to 20 points on a mobile PageSpeed score by itself.
• A slow theme is the one problem the other five steps can’t fix. It’s worth ruling out early, not after everything else.

How to speed up a Shopify website comes down to six checkable steps: testing your current speed, compressing images, removing unused apps, disabling leftover app embeds, checking your theme, and re-testing. None of it requires coding experience to start.

Speeding up your Shopify store comes down to six simple steps. Start by testing your current speed. Then compress images, remove unused apps, disable leftover app embeds, and check your theme. Finally, re-test your store. You do not need coding experience to complete these steps. If your theme is part of the problem, compare the fastest Shopify themes for 2026. This can help you see whether your current setup is limiting performance.

How Do I Speed Up My Shopify Store?

Speed up a Shopify store by working through six steps in order: run a speed test to establish a baseline, compress and resize your product images, remove any app you’re not actively using, turn off leftover app embeds under your theme settings, check whether your theme itself is the bottleneck, then re-test and compare the result against your original baseline. Most of these take under an hour each, and none require touching a single line of code.

Step 1: Test Your Speed Before You Touch Anything

Go to Google PageSpeed Insights, enter your store’s URL, and run the test on both mobile and desktop. Write down both numbers. This step gets skipped constantly, and it’s the only reason later steps are worth doing: without a baseline, there’s no way to know whether compressing your images actually helped or whether the number you’re looking at just moved on its own.

Most Shopify stores score somewhere between 25 and 45 on mobile before any work has been done. That’s not a bad starting point. It’s the average.

It helps to test more than just the homepage. A product page and a collection page usually carry more images and more app scripts than the homepage does, and they’re the pages most visitors actually land on from a search result or an ad. Testing all three gives a more honest picture than checking the homepage alone and assuming the rest of the store performs the same way.

Step 2: Compress and Resize Your Images

Images are usually the single biggest reason a Shopify store loads slowly. A photo straight from a camera or a stock photo site can easily be five to ten times larger than it needs to be for how it actually displays on a product page.

Resize product images before uploading them, usually to around 800–1000 pixels wide. Then compress them with tools like TinyPNG or Squoosh to reduce file size without losing visible quality. Shopify can also serve optimized formats such as WebP to supported browsers, helping pages load faster.

Step 3: Remove Apps You’re Not Using

Every app installed on a Shopify store adds its own code to every page, whether a visitor ever uses that app’s feature or not. A store that’s been running for a year or two often has three or four apps installed for a feature that got tried once and forgotten.

Open your installed apps and review them one by one. Remove any app that no longer serves a clear purpose. This is often one of the quickest ways to improve mobile PageSpeed performance.

A common issue is having two apps that do the same job. For example, you may have two review widgets or two pop-up tools. This often happens when you install a replacement but forget to remove the original app. Both apps may keep loading scripts, even though visitors only use one of them. If you are replacing an app, compare the best Shopify apps for 2026. Choose a tool that meets a real store need without adding unnecessary apps.

Step 4: Turn Off Leftover App Embeds

Uninstalling an app doesn’t always remove everything it added to your store. Some apps leave behind a small piece of code called an app embed, which keeps running even after the app itself is gone.

Check for these under Online Store, Themes, Customize, and then App Embeds. Anything listed there that belongs to an app already uninstalled should be switched off. This is a two-minute check that most store owners never know to make, simply because nothing in the Shopify admin points to it directly.

Step 5: Check Whether Your Theme Is the Problem

If you’re still wondering how to speed up a Shopify website after completing the first four steps, the theme itself might be the ceiling. Some themes, especially older ones or heavily customized versions of a once-fast theme, carry a lot of extra code that no amount of image compression or app cleanup can work around.

Shopify’s newer Online Store 2.0 themes often perform better than older or heavily customized themes. If your store still feels slow after completing the earlier steps, the theme may be the main issue. At that point, expert help can save time and prevent unnecessary changes. Our Shopify development and Shopify design teams can identify theme-level performance problems and recommend the right fix.

There’s a simple way to sanity-check this before committing to anything bigger. Search for your exact theme name and “demo” to find Shopify’s demo version of it, then run that demo store through PageSpeed Insights. If the stripped-down demo scores dramatically higher than your live store, the gap is coming from customization and content, not the theme itself. If even the bare demo scores low, the theme is the ceiling. If you’re considering a replacement, it helps to first understand how to choose the right Shopify theme based on performance, scalability, SEO, and your store’s actual requirements.

Step 6: Re-Test and Compare Against Your Baseline

Go back to PageSpeed Insights and run the same test from Step 1 on both mobile and desktop. Compare the new numbers to what you wrote down at the start. This is the step that turns the previous five from guesswork into something measurable.

If the score barely moved, that’s useful information too. It usually means the theme is the real bottleneck, which points straight back to Step 5.

How Do I Know If My Store Is Fast Enough?

Google PageSpeed Insights classifies scores from 90 to 100 as good. Scores from 50 to 89 need improvement, while scores below 50 are poor. However, you do not need to chase a perfect 100. Product images, apps, and other store features can affect the score. You should also check Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console. This report shows how your store performs for real visitors on real devices, not just in a single lab test.

If you’re hitting a mobile score in the 50s or 60s after working through the six steps above, the store is in reasonable shape. Anything below 40 after all six steps usually points to the theme, not to anything left on this checklist.

Pro Tip 💡

Do the six steps in order, and re-test after each one rather than waiting until the end. Speeding through all six at once and testing only at the finish makes it impossible to know which step actually made the difference, and that’s exactly the information you’ll want the next time the store slows back down.

If you’ve worked through every step here and the numbers still aren’t moving the way you’d expect, it’s worth a second opinion before assuming the fix requires a full rebuild.
Still Struggling With a Slow Shopify Store? Get in touch with our team, and we’ll help you figure out exactly where the store is losing speed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is my Shopify store so slow?

A Shopify store is usually slowed by what has been added to it rather than Shopify’s hosting itself. Common causes include third-party app scripts, oversized images, heavy themes, leftover app code, and unnecessary JavaScript. Start by testing the store, then audit apps and images before making deeper theme changes. 

What is a good Shopify PageSpeed score?

Google classifies Lighthouse/PageSpeed performance scores of 90–100 as good, 50–89 as needing improvement, and below 50 as poor. However, don’t judge the store from the score alone. Core Web Vitals and real-user performance data provide additional context about how visitors actually experience the site. 

Do Shopify apps slow down your store?

They can. Storefront-facing apps may add JavaScript, CSS, network requests, or app embeds to pages. The number of installed apps alone isn’t the deciding factor; what matters is how much code each app loads and whether that code is needed. Removing unused or redundant apps is therefore a useful early optimization step. 

Will changing my Shopify theme make my store faster?

It can, especially if the existing theme is old, heavily customized, or carries unnecessary code. Before changing themes, compare your current store with a clean demo of the same theme. If the demo performs substantially better, customizations, apps, or content may be causing the slowdown rather than the theme itself. If you’re still trying to understand how to speed up a Shopify website, checking theme performance is an important final step. Apps, images, fonts, and custom code can all reduce a theme’s clean-install performance.