How to Check Shopify Store Speed?

Introduction

Somewhere in your Shopify admin sits a number quietly deciding how much money you make this month, and most merchants have never once looked at it. It’s not your conversion rate or your average order value.

That’s the case for running a Shopify store speed test before you go looking for answers anywhere else.

It takes less time than reading this paragraph did, and it tells you, in hard numbers, exactly which page is costing you the sale before a customer ever sees your checkout button.

Skip it, and you’re losing out on customers, sales, and money to competitors.

This guide walks through how to check Shopify store speed properly, using Shopify’s own tools plus two independent testers, so you’re not trusting one number that could be wrong, and what’s actually worth fixing once you know where the leak is.

What Is a Shopify Store Speed Test?

A Shopify store speed test is a check that measures how fast your storefront loads and responds for a real visitor, then scores that performance against benchmarks like Google Lighthouse and Core Web Vitals: LCP, INP, and CLS.

Run one, and you get three things back: a Shopify speed score you can track over time, a page-by-page breakdown of what’s actually slow (images, apps, scripts, or theme code), and a benchmark to compare your store against similar ones.

It matters because “fast” and “feels fast” aren’t the same thing. A store can load instantly on a laptop over office Wi-Fi and still take 8 seconds on a customer’s phone over mobile data; testing is the only way to know which is true for your visitors.

Want to Do a Shopify Store Speed Test? Here’s the Step-by-Step Guide

Step 1: Check Your Native Shopify Speed Score

The fastest way to test Shopify store speed doesn’t require leaving your admin. Shopify has a built-in Online Store Speed report that scores your storefront using Google Lighthouse.

Go to Shopify Admin → Analytics → Reports → Online Store Speed. Your score is a weighted average of Lighthouse performance results across three pages: your home page, your highest-traffic product page, and your highest-traffic collection page over the last seven days, recalculated daily at 9:00 AM UTC.

A few things worth knowing about your Shopify speed score:

• Shopify requires a minimum average Lighthouse performance score of 60 across your home, product, and collection pages just for a theme to be accepted into the Theme Store, so if your live store is scoring lower than that, something installed after launch (an app, a custom section, unoptimized images) is likely the culprit.
• The report also shows how your score compares to similar stores in your traffic tier, which is useful context before you panic over a number in isolation.
• You need the “Reports” staff permission to view it, so if you can’t find the report, that’s likely why.

This report is your baseline. Everything else in this guide helps you dig into why that number looks the way it does.

Step 2: Run a Shopify Page Speed Test with Google PageSpeed Insights

Shopify’s native report is a good starting signal, but for a granular, metric-by-metric breakdown, go straight to Google PageSpeed Insights.

This is the free tool Google itself uses to evaluate the same page experience signals that affect your search rankings.

Here’s how it works, and why it’s worth using as your Shopify speed tester of choice:

1. Go to pagespeed.web.dev and paste in a specific URL: your homepage, your bestselling product page, or your main collection page.
2. Click Analyze. The tool combines two data types: lab data, generated by Lighthouse in a controlled, simulated environment, and field data, pulled from real Chrome users via the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) over the previous 28 days.
3. Review your Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

The current “good” thresholds, as defined by Google, are:

(Source: web.dev, “How the Core Web Vitals metrics thresholds were defined”)

Google evaluates these at the 75th percentile of real visits, meaning 75% of your visits need to hit “good” for the page to actually pass.

Test both mobile and desktop separately; mobile is almost always the weaker score, and it’s the version Google indexes first under mobile-first indexing.

Step 3: Cross-Check with a Third-Party Shopify Speed Tester

Google PageSpeed Insights is authoritative, but running your Shopify page speed test through a second tool like GTmetrix helps confirm the diagnosis and adds a visual timeline of exactly what loads and when.

To use it: go to GTmetrix, enter your store URL, and click “Test your Site.” For more realistic results, set the test location to wherever most of your customers actually are, and choose a connection speed that matches your audience.

Recommended: test on a mid-tier mobile connection, not fiber broadband, since that’s what a large share of real shoppers are on.

GTmetrix will return a letter grade, a full Web Vitals breakdown, and a speed visualization, essentially a filmstrip showing your page rendering frame by frame.

This is genuinely useful for spotting the exact moment something (usually an oversized hero image or a render-blocking script) stalls the page.

Test more than your homepage. Product and collection pages carry your ad traffic and your highest purchase intent, so a slow product page is a more expensive problem than a slow homepage.

Step 4: Compare Mobile vs. Desktop Results

Don’t skip this step. The gap between mobile and desktop speed is often the single biggest performance issue on a Shopify store, and it’s invisible if you only ever test on your own laptop.

Run the same product page through both a mobile and desktop test and compare LCP, INP, and CLS side by side.

If your mobile LCP is well over 2.5 seconds while desktop passes comfortably, the fix usually lives in unoptimized image delivery, third-party app scripts loading before your content, or a theme that wasn’t built mobile-first.

Choosing the right starting point matters here too; our roundup of the fastest Shopify themes covers which ones handle mobile well out of the box.

Step 5: Document a Baseline and Re-Test on a Schedule

A single test is a snapshot, not a trend. Save your scores from Shopify’s native report, PageSpeed Insights, and GTmetrix in a simple spreadsheet, then re-test monthly or after any theme, app, or major content change.

This is the only way to catch performance regressions before they quietly cost you conversions, because apps get added, images get uploaded at full resolution, and scores drift down over time without anyone noticing.

Shopify Expert Tips for Shopify Speed Optimization

Testing tells you what’s wrong. Fixing it is where the actual conversion gains happen. Here’s where to focus first, and if you want the deeper, tactic-by-tactic version of everything below, our Shopify speed optimization guide covers it in more depth.

1. Compress and Resize Every Image Before It Ships

Images use more bandwidth than anything else on a Shopify page, and they’re also the easiest fix on this list.

Shopify’s own developer documentation is clear about it: a full-size image looks the same to you on a big monitor, but it slows load time on a customer’s phone.

So specify your image sizes, and let the browser pull the smallest file that still looks sharp. If you haven’t already, optimize images for Shopify before you touch anything else here to lift your Shopify speed score.

2. Get Ruthless About Liquid and JavaScript

Shopify’s own guidance is specific here: sort a collection by price before you loop through the products in Liquid, not inside the loop itself.

Repeating that logic on every pass quietly slows your render time. Treat JavaScript the same way.

Use plain HTML and CSS where you can, skip anything that blocks the page from rendering, and check what each third-party app script is actually doing before you assume it’s harmless.

It’s not exciting work, but it’s core Shopify speed optimization, the kind almost nobody goes back and does once a store is live.

3. Audit Your Apps Quarterly, Not Just Once

Every app adds its own script to your storefront, and most merchants never remove the ones they’ve stopped using.

If you’re not sure which app is dragging your score down, don’t guess; top Shopify speed optimization apps can flag the heaviest offenders before you go digging through your app list by hand.

4. Treat Mobile as the Default, Not the Afterthought

Mobile carries more weight under Google’s mobile-first indexing, and it converts worse the moment things slow down.

So flip your process: judge every theme change, every app, every new section on mobile first, then check desktop.

A tweak that looks harmless on your laptop can add real weight on a phone, and a phone is what most of your customers are actually holding. When you run your next Shopify page speed test, pull the mobile report first and treat it as the real number.

5. Fix Layout Shift Before You Fix Anything Cosmetic

A banner that loads late. A font that swaps mid-render. An image with no reserved space. You’ll barely notice any of it scrolling your own store, but your customer feels every bit of it, especially when the page jumps just as they go to tap “Add to Cart.”

Reserve the space before the element loads, and CLS usually stops dragging down your Shopify speed score on its own.

6. Don’t Treat This as a One-Time Project

The math is hard to argue with: a store doing $10 million a year can recover roughly $500,000 by shaving just 500 milliseconds off load time, and slow sites cost online retailers an estimated $2.6 billion a year, industry-wide.

Shopify speed optimization isn’t something you check off at launch. It’s ongoing maintenance, and it pays for itself every month you keep doing it.

Final Thoughts

At the end, the goal isn’t running one test and calling it done. It’s building speed into how you make decisions going forward, every new app, every theme update, every campaign launch, checked against what it costs your load time before it ships.

If your results turned up real problems, a stack of forgotten apps, oversized images, a theme that was never built mobile-first, fixing it properly is usually more than a weekend project.

And if you need professional assistance to help you with a Shopify speed test or end-to-end store optimization, then our team at Enstacked comes in.

We run full Shopify speed audits and handle the fix from there: image and code cleanup, app cleanup, mobile performance, and ongoing monitoring, all as part of our end-to-end Shopify development services built to turn a faster store into more sales and higher conversions.

Book your free Shopify store audit.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)