App Rationalization & Collection Page Optimization for Shopify Store

The Challenge

Project Overview

Lamar Collective is a Shopify store with a large product catalog that needed speed optimization to improve the shopping experience and search rankings.

The large number of products, combined with heavy theme customizations and multiple Shopify apps, created significant performance issues particularly on collection and product pages.

The Goals

Goals & Objectives

The primary goal of this project was to improve Google's Core Web Vitals, site speed, and overall user experience and usability.

Our primary goals were to:

• Reduce mobile LCP below 2.5s
• Achieve perfect desktop performance score
• Eliminate Total Blocking Time across devices

The Solution

Our Approach

A systematic, step-by-step process tailored to Lamar Collective's needs.

1. 1

   Shopify Audit

   Full audit of theme, apps, and product page performance.

2. 2

   Theme Optimization

   Streamlined Liquid templates and reduced unnecessary code.

3. 3

   App Optimization

   Optimized app script loading and removed redundant apps.

4. 4

   Image Optimization

   Implemented proper sizing and lazy loading for product images.

5. 5

   Collection Page Optimization

   Improved performance on high-traffic collection pages.

The Results

Outcomes

Core metrics that improved over the duration of the project.

• 77% Mobile LCP Reduction. Mobile LCP dropped from 12.4s to 2.8s, a 77% improvement.
• 100 Desktop Perf Score. Desktop performance score improved from 87 to a perfect 100.
• 94% Mobile TBT Reduction. Mobile TBT reduced from 160ms to just 10ms.

Lessons

Key Takeaways

• Large Shopify catalogs need collection-page-specific optimization strategies.
• App rationalization is one of the fastest ways to improve Shopify performance.
• Product image optimization at scale delivers compounding improvements.