For Newcastle stores losing sales to a slow site
A slow Shopify store is usually carrying apps it no longer uses, and each one is still loading.
A report on your own store, showing how quickly it becomes usable on a phone and what is holding it up.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
2 minutes
Since it went live my phone hasn’t stopped ringing.
He created a stunning website for us that captures and nurtures leads with an automated email marketing system, which has filled a huge gap in the business and saved a lot of time (and money!).
Reece has been generous, reliable and knowledgeable in creating an online presence for our sporting club. He is good to work with and has good technical abilities.
Shopify speed optimisation in Newcastle nearly always starts in the same place, and it is not the pictures.
It is the apps a store installed, trialled and stopped using, all of which are still loading on every page.
Installed apps, an overloaded theme, oversized images and third party tracking scripts. Apps are the largest and the easiest to fix.
Shopify handles the hosting, so the platform is rarely the problem. Almost everything slow about a store was added to it.
Removing unused apps and their leftover code, then the images. Those two account for most of what can be recovered without a rebuild.
Speed work has a point of diminishing returns, and most stores reach it well before anybody needs to touch the theme code.
Less than the headlines claim and more than most owners assume. The honest gain is on a phone, on a poor connection, on the pages people arrive at.
A store that is quick on a desk computer and slow on a phone is slow, because that is where most people shop.
Related reading from us: Web Design Newcastle.
Most often the apps. Every installed app loads on every page, and apps removed through the dashboard frequently leave code behind in the theme.
It shows up most on a phone, on the product and collection pages people arrive at directly. That is where any real gain appears.
Not as a first step. Removing unused apps and resizing images recovers most of what is available without making future updates harder.
The score matters less than how quickly the store becomes usable on a phone on an ordinary connection. That is the measure worth tracking.
One monthly fee covering everything, month to month, no lock-in. The number depends on the business and gets given on the call.