What we check in a free Shopify speed audit (and when we tell you not to hire us)

A free audit from an agency usually means a sales call with a PDF attached. Ours is a short document you can act on whether you hire us or not. Here’s what’s in it and how we get there.

The numbers we pull

We run your homepage and one product page through Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile and desktop. From that we take four things:

• Performance score out of 100. This is the number most people have seen, and it’s the one our guarantee is written against.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), in seconds. How long until the biggest thing on the screen, usually your hero image, actually shows up. Google calls anything over 2.5 seconds “needs improvement” and anything over 4 seconds “poor.”
• Total Blocking Time (TBT), in milliseconds. How long the page is frozen while scripts run. This is the one that makes a store feel broken even when it looks loaded, because taps don’t register.
• Total page weight, in megabytes. How much your visitor has to download before the page settles.

We care about mobile first. Most Shopify stores get the majority of their traffic from phones, and mobile scores are almost always the worse of the two.

One thing we’re upfront about: the audit number comes from a single PageSpeed run, and PageSpeed moves around. The same store can score 38 one minute and 46 the next. So the audit score is a snapshot, not a baseline. If you hire us, we take five runs before we start and five when we finish, use the median of each, and send you all ten raw results. That’s what the guarantee is measured on, not the number in the audit.

The three things costing you the most

Lighthouse (the engine behind PageSpeed) gives an estimated time saving for every issue it finds. We sort those by seconds, take the top three, and write each one up in plain words for a store owner, not a developer.

So instead of “eliminate render-blocking resources,” you’ll read something like: “A reviews app you installed in 2023 loads a 400 KB script on every page before anything else can draw. Lighthouse estimates removing or deferring it would save 1.8 seconds on mobile.”

We name the specific thing we saw. The app, the image file, the script. If we can’t point at it, it doesn’t go in the audit.

The usual suspects, in roughly the order we see them:

1. Third-party app scripts that load on every page whether or not that page uses them. Reviews, popups, chat widgets, upsells, tracking pixels. Each one is small. Twelve of them aren’t.
2. Oversized images. A 4,000 pixel hero image served to a 390 pixel phone screen. Shopify’s CDN can resize on the fly, but only if the theme asks it to.
3. Leftover code from uninstalled apps. Deleting an app from your admin doesn’t always delete what it put in your theme. We find snippets from apps the owner forgot they ever tried.
4. Fonts. Four weights of a custom font, none of them preloaded, all of them blocking text from rendering.
5. Theme JavaScript that runs everything up front instead of waiting until a visitor scrolls or taps.

We only put three in the audit because fixing those three is the job. A list of twenty findings looks thorough and gets nothing done.

The part a person does by hand

After the numbers, one of us loads your store on a throttled mobile connection and just watches it.

What renders first? Does the text show up on a white screen and the images land two seconds later? Does a popup fire before the page has even settled? Does the page jump around as things load in?

This takes a few minutes and it’s in every audit we send, because PageSpeed can’t tell you how a page feels. A store can score 55 and feel fine. Another can score 55 and feel like it’s fighting you. The hand check is how we tell the difference, and it’s how you know a human looked at your store and not just a script.

What we’d do, and when it’s nothing

The audit ends with a recommendation. Usually that’s our Speed and App Cleanup package, with a line or two on why the findings fit it.

Sometimes it’s not. Two cases where we’ll tell you not to hire us:

Your mobile score is already decent. Our guarantee is that your homepage reaches 65 or better on mobile. If you’re already at 70, we can’t guarantee anything meaningful, and we’re not going to take $1,497 to move you from 70 to 78. We’ll say so, and if there’s one cheap thing worth doing, we’ll tell you what it is.

The problem isn’t speed. Sometimes a store loads fine and the issue is a broken filter, a checkout app that’s misbehaving, or a theme that’s just old. Speed work won’t help. We’ll point you at what we think is actually wrong, which might be a different package of ours or might be something you can fix yourself.

We’d rather send ten audits and get two jobs we can stand behind than send ten audits and get five jobs where half the clients wonder what they paid for.

What the audit isn’t

It’s not a full theme review. We’re looking at speed and the things that affect it, not your design, your copy, or your conversion rate. We won’t tell you how much revenue you’re losing to load time, because we didn’t measure that and anyone who gives you that number without measuring it is guessing.

It’s also not a commitment. Keep the audit, hand it to your own developer, or do nothing with it. The findings are accurate either way.

How to get one

Put your store URL in the form on our homepage. We’ll come back within a few days with the document described above. If you’d rather talk it through first, there’s a link to book a short call on the same page.