When a shopper opens your homepage for the first time, their phone downloads everything: images, code, fonts, videos. That download has a weight, and the weight decides how long the shopper waits.
We weighed nine established Shopify homepages this month, the way a first-time visitor loads them: empty cache, nothing saved. The lightest was 0.8 MB. The heaviest was 18.3 MB. The average was about 6 MB.
The spread
The 23x gap between the lightest and heaviest store is the interesting part. Both are real stores that sell well. Both look good. One asks the shopper's phone to do 23 times more work before anything is for sale.
Where the weight hides
- Images at full size. A 4000-pixel photo sent to a 400-pixel phone screen. The phone shrinks it, but only after downloading all of it.
- Autoplaying video. A hero video is often more than the rest of the page combined.
- Everything at once. The page loads images the shopper will not see unless they scroll to the very bottom.
- Scripts. In the same nine stores, the average homepage ran 113 scripts. Each one is weight, and each one is also work for the phone's processor after the download ends.
What good looks like
There is no prize for the smallest page. There is a cost for a slow one: shoppers leave before it finishes, and Google reads the same slowness for ranking. A homepage under 2 MB is comfortable on a normal phone connection. Under 1 MB, it feels instant.
The fixes are unglamorous and they work:
- Send each screen the image size it needs, not the original.
- Load images below the fold only when the shopper scrolls near them.
- Show a still image first, and load the video after the page is usable.
- Cut the scripts. We wrote aguide with code for the ones you keep.
If you want your store's number, ask us. Weighing a homepage takes us a day and costs you nothing.