Specialist Retail
Layout Shift Remediation
Homepage layout shift cut by 88% on mobile, and product pages brought into Google’s “good” range.
Freelance project, delivered under NDA. Details available on request.
Role
Performance & optimisation
Focus
Shopify
- −88%
- Homepage, mobile
- −77%
- Product page, mobile
- −52%
- Product page, desktop
01
Challenge
The store had a conversion problem. An audit found severe layout shift: page content jumping as it loaded, especially on mobile. Buttons moving under customers’ thumbs cause mis-taps and cost trust at exactly the moment someone is deciding to buy.
02
The approach
- Baseline: Lighthouse audits across the homepage, collection and product templates on desktop and mobile, to find which elements caused the most shift.
- Phased fixes: the first release improved some templates but didn’t fully resolve the problem, so I reviewed the data again.
- Changing the scope based on the data: testing showed the shift came from several sources loading together, both Shopify’s own content and third-party apps. Fixing whole sections (for example, the gallery and the product form together) rather than individual components is what produced the improvement.
- Validation: before-and-after testing of the live store against the updated theme, with a plain-English report covering what worked, what didn’t and what was rolled back.
03
Results
Cumulative Layout Shift, lower is better; Google rates ≤ 0.1 as “good”.
| Page | Device | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Homepage | Mobile | 1.232 | 0.147 | −88% |
| Product page | Mobile | 0.106 | 0.024 | −77%, into “good” |
| Product page | Desktop | 0.066 | 0.032 | −52% |
Lighthouse lab results; the live store and the updated theme were tested in the same session.
04
Takeaway
Start from the business problem, measure before changing anything, and let the data shape the scope.
More work
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