Project Overview
Nordic Home Studio, a Shopify Plus merchant selling Scandinavian furniture, was experiencing severe performance issues. Their homepage took 8.2 seconds to load.
Performance Audit
I conducted a comprehensive performance audit covering every layer of the store's frontend.
Unoptimized images: 4.2MB of hero images loaded on every page
Render-blocking scripts: 14 third-party scripts loading synchronously
Liquid render time: Complex nested loops causing 800ms server response
No caching strategy: Browser cache headers misconfigured
Optimization Strategy
The optimization was executed in three phases over 4 weeks.
Phase 1: Critical Path
Extracted and inlined critical CSS, deferred all non-essential JavaScript.
Phase 2: Assets
Implemented responsive images with srcset, converted to WebP with AVIF fallback.
Phase 3: Liquid & Server
Refactored Liquid templates to eliminate N+1 queries, implemented fragment caching.
Results
Load time: 8.2s → 3.1s (62% reduction)
Lighthouse score: 34 → 92
Bounce rate: 67% → 38%
Mobile conversion: +41% increase