A slow store always costs you sales, but it costs you the most when traffic spikes. On Black Friday, you are paying for clicks, and every second a page takes to appear is a chance for that shopper to leave. The good news is that most Shopify speed problems come from a short list of causes, and you can fix many of them in a weekend.
This guide shows you how to measure your speed, what usually slows a store down, and what to fix first, in the weeks before Black Friday on November 27.
Speed tools give you numbers that move around between tests. Use them to find the biggest problems and to compare before and after, not to chase a perfect score. What matters is that the real pages your shoppers use feel fast on a phone.
Step 1: measure the right pages
Test three pages: your home page, one collection page and one product page, because these are the pages your traffic actually sees. Test on mobile first, since most holiday shopping happens on phones. Free tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights give you a report with specific suggestions, and Shopify’s own online store speed report in your admin gives you another view.
Write down the results before you change anything. You will want something to compare against. Our free store health score is another quick way to spot obvious problems.
Step 2: fix the common causes, in this order
1. Oversized images
This is the most common problem. A hero banner uploaded at a huge size, or product photos straight from a camera, can weigh several megabytes. Resize images to the size they are actually shown at, use modern formats where your theme supports them, and keep your first banner as light as you can.
2. Too many apps
Each app can add its own scripts and styles to every page. Go through your installed apps and ask whether each one is earning its place. Remove the ones you no longer use. Be aware that uninstalling an app does not always remove its leftover code from your theme, so check that too.
3. Heavy sliders, pop-ups and widgets
Auto-playing carousels, several pop-ups, chat widgets and live-feed notifications all load extra code. Keep the ones that clearly earn money and drop the rest. For a sale, a single clear banner often beats three competing ones.
4. Large videos at the top of the page
Video can sell, but a large file loading before the shopper sees anything slows the page. Consider loading it later or using a still image first.
5. Too many fonts and styles
Each additional font or font weight is another file to download. Stick to one or two.
6. Third-party tracking scripts
Ad pixels, analytics and heatmaps are useful, but each adds weight. Keep what you use, and make sure the same pixel is not installed twice by an app and by hand. Our own site loads analytics only after a visitor agrees, which keeps the first load light.
7. A heavy theme or old customisations
Some themes carry a lot of code you never use, and years of small edits can pile up. If your store is very slow even after the fixes above, a theme clean-up may be worth more than more small tweaks.
What to leave alone close to the sale
Do not switch themes, install a pile of new apps or rebuild your home page in the last two weeks. Set a code freeze date, such as November 20, and test every change on a phone before it goes live. If speed is a serious problem and you are short on time, fix the images and remove unused apps first, since these give the biggest gains for the least risk.
A simple plan for the next three weeks
- This week: measure your three pages on mobile and write the numbers down.
- Next week: resize images, remove unused apps and check that nothing is installed twice.
- The week after: re-test, compare with your first numbers and fix whatever is still the heaviest.
- Before the freeze: run a full test order on a phone to make sure nothing broke while you were speeding things up.
Final thoughts
You do not need a perfect score for Black Friday. You need pages that load quickly on a phone, a checkout that works and nothing new to break at the last minute. Fix the images, clear out the apps you do not need, and test like a shopper.
If you would rather hand this over, our Shopify page speed optimization service finds and fixes the heaviest problems, and our conversion rate optimization work looks at what happens once the page has loaded. Our Black Friday checklist puts speed in the context of everything else to check.
