This week we loaded the homepages of nine established Shopify retailers and measured what arrived. Fashion, homeware, cosmetics, luxury goods. All real stores, all trading today. We used a fresh browser with an empty cache, the way a first-time shopper arrives.
One number stood out. The average homepage runs 113 scripts, and 85 of them come from third parties: reviews, chat, email pop-ups, analytics, ads, feeds. The store's own code is the minority on its own homepage.
The data
The stores stay unnamed. The point is not to embarrass anyone. The point is that these are good stores, run by serious teams, and every one of them carries this weight. This is the normal condition of a Shopify store after years of trading.
What else we found
- The lightest homepage was 0.8 MB. The heaviest was 18.3 MB. The average was about 6 MB.
- Two of the nine failed Google's layout shift test - the page moves while the shopper reads it, and Google scores that against the store in search.
- One homepage took 3.9 seconds to show its main image on a fast connection. Google's pass line is 2.5 seconds. Most shoppers are on phones, on worse connections.
How it gets this way
Nobody plans a 113-script homepage. It grows. Each app solves one real problem, and each app adds its script. The marketing team adds a pixel. A past agency adds a tool and leaves. Nothing is ever removed, because nothing visibly breaks when a script is added. The cost lands somewhere invisible: the shopper's first second.
That first second is not decoration. Shoppers leave slow pages before the pages finish, and Google reads the same signals for ranking. The weight is a tax on every visit, paid daily, noticed never.
What to do about it
Three moves, in order of return:
- Remove. Go through the app list. For each app, ask what breaks tomorrow if it is gone. Silence means uninstall.
- Delay. Chat, pop-ups, and notification prompts do not need the first second. Hold them until the shopper moves. We published exactly how, with code:delay third-party scripts until first interaction.
- Measure. Test before and after with PageSpeed Insights. Scores move in steps. Know which step each change bought.
We measure stores like this every week. If you want to know what your homepage carries, ask us - the measurement is free, and it takes a day.