The Store's Starting Situation
The store was doing $22,000/month with a 1.4% conversion rate. PageSpeed score: 41 mobile / 58 desktop. They were spending $4,500/month on Facebook and Google ads — but their slow store was undermining every dollar of ad spend. Higher ad costs, same slow landing page, poor return on investment.
Fix #1: Removed 6 Dead App Scripts (Impact: High)
The store had installed and uninstalled 9 apps over 3 years. Six of them had left scripts behind in theme.liquid. Removing these cut 1.8 seconds from load time alone. This was the single highest-impact change — and it took less than 2 hours to do safely.
Fix #2: Compressed & Converted Hero Images (Impact: High)
The homepage hero banner was a 3.2MB PNG. We converted it to WebP at 85% quality — resulting in a 180KB file that looked identical. Combined with proper sizing, this reduced above-the-fold load by 1.4 seconds.
Fix #3: Deferred All Non-Critical JavaScript (Impact: High)
12 JavaScript files were loading synchronously. We added defer to 9 of them (keeping 3 critical ones synchronous). This improved Time to Interactive by 1.1 seconds.
Fix #4: Implemented Lazy Loading (Impact: Medium)
The collection pages were loading all 24 product images at once. Adding lazy loading reduced initial page load by 40% on collection pages — the most-visited pages on the site.
Fix #5: Fixed Google Fonts Loading (Impact: Medium)
Two Google Font families were loaded without font-display: swap. Adding this and preloading critical fonts eliminated the Flash of Invisible Text (FOIT) and improved Cumulative Layout Shift score from 0.28 to 0.04.
Fixes #6–10: Technical Polish (Impact: Cumulative)
Remaining fixes: (6) Removed duplicate jQuery instance — saved 87KB. (7) Added browser caching headers for static assets. (8) Minified theme CSS — reduced from 340KB to 180KB. (9) Removed unused CSS from uninstalled page builder. (10) Fixed broken image links causing 404 errors that slowed page rendering.
The 60-Day Results
Mobile PageSpeed: 41 → 87. Desktop PageSpeed: 58 → 94. Load time: 5.8s → 1.6s. Conversion rate: 1.4% → 1.72% (+23%). Monthly revenue: $22,000 → $27,060 (+$5,060/month). ROI on optimization investment: 1,686% in 60 days. The store reduced their ad spend by $800/month while increasing revenue.