Why is my Shopify store slow?

Apps and images, in that order. Shopify’s own infrastructure is rarely the cause — what makes a store slow is what has been added to it.

The reasoning

Measure with the apps disabled one at a time on a copy of the theme. The result is usually that two of them account for most of the delay, and one of those two is not being used.

What most people get wrong

Shopify handles the parts that are genuinely hard and genuinely regulated: payments, taxes, order records. That is what the subscription is for.

The apps in the Shopify store are where the cost quietly grows. Six at twenty dollars a month is more than the plan.

Most Shopify performance problems are the theme and the images, not Shopify.

How an app changes it

A mobile app sits on top of Shopify rather than replacing it — the catalogue syncs, and checkout stays Shopify’s.