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by jstgord 1434 days ago
oh.. I had assumed this referred to the _technical_ dark side ..

Was just toying around with porting a friends very successful shopify store to another platform .. noticed the main home page weighed in at 89MB .. wowza. [ To be fair a lot of that was large pngs which are much smaller as jpg or webp ]

Scrolling thru the endless html/css/js page sources injected plethora of 'liquid' inclusions, I can only describe as otherworldly.
3 comments
SquareWheel 1434 days ago
It would take some very large images to add up to 89MB, even if they were png. I'm guessing they were not sized correctly for the web.
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jstgord 1434 days ago
indeed ..

Top offenders were essentially 2048 pixel wide png photos which should have been 1024 wide jpgs at max - weighing 6MB instead of 250k for a difference the human eye probably cant detect : )

but.. more than that, just an endless stream of js html css inclusions .. I suspect 85% of which is dormant, 20% actually repeated, if I were to guess.

hehe

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raihansaputra 1434 days ago
I'd hazard it's mostly images and/or the plugins the store has installed to track conversions and / or extend the Shopify store. I do admit plain Shopify stores/themes are quick and lightweight, and the plugins are to blame, but I also point at Shopify for blocking some easy features to be supplanted by plugins.
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CptFribble 1433 days ago
It's easy to shoot yourself in the foot with Shopify dev, especially since many merchants are non-technical and there are an unlimited number of very cheap Shopify "dev" shops that will paste anything you want into your theme with no regard for bloat.

Many people running brands, either professional digital marketers or small business owners, have absolutely no concept of page weight. I continually fight battles about this with the various ecomm brands my employer owns, and yet when a marketer updates the home page content somehow we still wind up with 20 MB above-the-fold autoplay movie files.

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savrajsingh 1434 days ago
Fun fact: Shopify user accounts are a disaster. Customers cannot stay logged in to your site for more than 24 hrs.
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SenHeng 1434 days ago
Maybe the shops you’re using have done that on purpose? I worked on a shopify storefront for the past year and our users stay logged in for an indeterminate amount of time.

We actually have a problem figuring out the exact amount of time their access token stays valid as it seems random, from a week to a month to 3 days.

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