u/shopify_chen

honest question for people who work on other people's stores — when you open a new client's shopify and look at the installed apps, what's the one you almost always end up removing?

for me it's usually an abandoned "speed booster" app that a previous dev installed and forgot about — half the time it's the thing actually slowing the store down. curious if there's a common repeat offender you all see too, or if it's different every time.

Been going down the performance rabbit hole lately and noticed half the "must do" advice barely moved my numbers, while a couple of boring changes made a real difference.

The one that overdelivered for me: cutting apps. dropped from 0.9% to 1.6% conversion mostly from removing scripts + fixing mobile image sizes — nothing exotic.

the one that underdelivered: obsessing over a perfect 90+ Lighthouse score. real users on real phones didn't care past a point.

Curious what everyone else found — what's the overhyped fix that wasted your time, and what's the underrated one that actually worked?

been auditing a few stores lately and the pattern that keeps surprising me is how often *removing* an app beats adding one. killed two that were loading on every page last month and the site got noticeably faster — conversion ticked up without touching anything else.

curious what everyone else has cut. could be a speed thing, a UX thing, or just something you paid for and never used. what did you remove, and what happened after?

every spring/seasonal drop i help with, the same handful of things break — and it's never the part people worry about. sharing my pre-launch checklist in case it saves someone a rough launch day:

1. collection sort silently resets. bulk-add 40 new products and your "manual" order gets buried — hero products end up on page 2. set sort to manual and drag your 6-8 best sellers to the top AFTER the import, not before.

2. image weight kills mobile LCP. those gorgeous spring lifestyle shots are 4MB each. anything over ~200kb above the fold roughly doubles mobile load time, right when launch traffic spikes. compress before upload, don't trust the theme to do it.

3. carryover "out of stock" states stick. winter products still show sold-out badges or hidden variants. check inventory policy on every variant, not just the product — it doesn't always inherit.

4. discount code + bundle app fight on the cart. if you run a launch code AND a bundle app, test the actual cart math before going live. they race each other and the wrong one usually wins silently.

curious what breaks for everyone else on a seasonal launch — is it always inventory, or does speed/theme bite you harder? what's your worst launch-day surprise?

been debugging a lot of these lately, especially on stores that added AI-generated or copy-pasted sections, so dropping the pattern here in case it saves someone an afternoon.

The symptom: you click add to cart, the product DOES get added (you see it after a refresh), but the slide-out cart drawer just sits there doing nothing until you reload the page.

It's almost always one of two things:

1. The section is doing a plain form POST to /cart/add instead of the ajax /cart/add.js. A hard POST adds the item, but the drawer never hears about it. quick check: open devtools > network, click add to cart, and look for a /cart/add.js call. If you see a full-page POST instead, that's your culprit.

2. It is using Ajax, but never tells the drawer to re-render. On Dawn-based themes, you want to pass `sections` in the add request (Section Rendering API) and swap in the returned cart-drawer HTML, OR dispatch the theme's cart-update event so the drawer listens and refreshes itself.

AI-generated sections are notorious for nailing the POST and skipping the re-render step entirely — the code "works" in isolation but doesn't talk to the rest of the theme.

Curious if anyone here has hit a third cause I'm missing? I've seen the two above maybe 9 times out of 10, but always happy to learn a new failure mode.