Boutique 1861 is a Montreal fashion retailer on Shopify Plus. The store sells in English and French, with a large catalog. The French side ran on a paid translation app. It worked, but it loaded on every page and was one of the heaviest things on mobile. At the same time, the store was failing Google's mobile Core Web Vitals on INP, the measure of how fast a page reacts when a shopper taps.
The app was doing too much
Most of the French text on the store is fixed: size charts, the "You may also like" heading, size labels like Small and Medium. None of that needs a live app on every page load. So we translated it inside the theme instead - a small piece of code that swaps the English text for French on the French pages, and does nothing everywhere else. The numbers in a size chart are left untouched. The variant a shopper adds to the cart is left untouched. Only the visible label changes.
With that in place, the translation app came off the store. No app on every page, and no monthly bill for it either.
Then we took weight off the load
Removing that app cut the mobile blocking time roughly in half on its own. After that we deferred the apps that are not needed for the first paint, so they load when the shopper first interacts instead of upfront. And we fixed a font setting that was holding the text back:
The old setting made the page wait for the brand font before it drew any text, so the words showed up late. The new setting draws the text at once in a system font, then swaps in the brand font when it arrives. Same look, no blank moment.
What moved
None of this changed how the store looks. It is the same site, faster, with one fewer app to pay for. A lot of "you need an app for that" turns out to be a few lines in the theme. If you want to know what your store is really paying for in speed, ask us - we will measure it and send you the list.