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JOURNAL — 012 · Development

# Shopify Speed: The 9 Fixes That Actually Move LCP

MQ Mahnoor Qureshi, Head of Design · November 25, 2025 · 4 min read

You can't touch Shopify's server, so most 'speed apps' are placebo. These nine theme-level fixes are where mobile LCP genuinely comes from.

Shopify speed advice is 90% superstition because the platform hides the server. So we measured: eleven stores, one variable at a time. Your LCP lives in the hero image, the font stack and the app scripts — in that order. Everything else is garnish.

## Integration is where builds actually live

Nobody's website is an island — it syncs stock, posts leads to a CRM, fires events to analytics, and triggers email. These seams are where projects overrun and where launches leak data.

We map every integration with its failure mode: what happens when the CRM is down, when the rate limit hits, when the API token expires on a Saturday. Every mapping gets a queue, a retry, or a human alert.

A website is a frontend for your operations. Builds that respect that ship on time; builds that discover it at go-live get a second, more expensive timeline.

## Signs your rebuild is overdue

1. Every change request returns with a bigger estimate than the last one
2. Two plugins conflict and the fix is a third plugin
3. Mobile LCP is over 4 seconds and nobody remembers why
4. The last person who understood the theme left a year ago
5. Marketing has a private doc of 'things the website can't do'

## Performance is architecture, not decoration

Speed work fails when it's scheduled as polish at the end — by then the decisions that mattered are entrenched: a builder emitting four wrappers per element, a slider library loaded for one page, fonts subset for nobody.

We budget performance like features: a 100-point Lighthouse target has an implementation plan from the wireframe. Image pipelines, script governance and font discipline are agreed before visual design polishes anything.

Teams that treat speed as a launch-week task end up shipping apology notes. Teams that budget it ship numbers.

> We don't do rescue projects anymore. We do builds that never need rescuing.Humdan Ali, founder

## The build-vs-plugin line

Every plugin is a dependency with its own author, roadmap and security record. Our line: if a requirement is core to the business and stable, build it natively; if it's peripheral and moving, rent it.

Custom code is not automatically better — badly written custom code is worse than a mature plugin. The calculus is control over the parts that make you money versus maintenance on the parts that don't.

## Technical debt has an interest rate

Nobody feels technical debt on the day it's taken. It arrives eighteen months later as 'a simple change' quoted at three weeks: the workaround that became load-bearing, the plugin forked and now unforkable.

The honest measure is drag per quarter — how much slower is each change than the one before it. When drag doubles, consolidation pays for itself faster than new features.

Refactoring for elegance is vanity. Refactoring to restore change-speed is maintenance, and it's usually overdue before anyone schedules it.

> A plugin is a promise made by a stranger. Choose few, choose well.Internal review, 2025

## Where to start this week

Preload the hero image, self-host two font weights instead of six, and remove every app that injects above the fold. That's fixes one through three — the rest compound from there.

Then keep it honest with a short list:

- Backups verified by an actual restore, not a green dashboard icon
- Rollback plan rehearsed: one command back to last-known-good
- Error monitoring on production with an owner assigned
- Put the date on the calendar — playbooks without Fridays are just reading

And when the scope outgrows the spreadsheet, that's precisely what our team is for.

## Straight answers

### What does post-launch support look like?

A named engineer, a queue with response times, monthly reports on updates, uptime and performance — and quarterly advice on what we'd fix next. No ticket black holes.

### Do you work with our existing theme or start over?

Both. We audit first: if the theme's bones and editor experience are sound, we harden and extend. Most inherited builders fail that audit on performance grounds, which is when a lean custom theme becomes the cheaper option over three years.

### Can you maintain a site another agency built?

Yes — it starts with a two-week stabilisation pass: backups, update hygiene, security baseline and a written map of what we found. After that it's a standard care plan with full transparency on findings.

Development ALIFY Journal 4 min read
MQ
Mahnoor Qureshi
Head of Design · ALIFY

Leads brand and product design at ALIFY. Believes taste is a process, not a gift — and conversion is a design metric.

Keep reading

## More from the journal.

Development July 18, 2026 6 min read Why Your WordPress Site Is Slow (and How We Fix It in 14 Days) Your site isn't slow because WordPress is slow. It's slow because of five fixable decisions — here's the exact two-week playbook we run on every performance rescue. Read article Development December 4, 2025 4 min read Block Themes vs Classic PHP: What We Actually Build in 2026 Gutenberg won the argument but not every project. An honest engineering answer to which WordPress architecture fits which client — with the maintenance bills to prove it. Read article Development December 13, 2025 4 min read INP Is the Metric Everyone's Failing: A Field Guide to Fixing It Interaction to Next Paint replaced FID and quietly became the hardest Core Web Vitals threshold. Here's what actually moves it — measured on real client builds, not lab demos. Read article
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