E-commerce · 2023 · 7 weeks
Bloom & Co
A home-and-garden Shopify store losing customers to an 8-second page load. We rebuilt the theme layer, cut load time to 1.8 seconds, and revenue rose 34% the following month.
The problem
Bloom & Co's store had grown the way most Shopify stores do: five years of apps, theme customisations and tracking scripts layered on top of each other. Home page loads averaged 8 seconds on mobile — and 70% of their traffic was mobile.
Priya Sharma's team could see the cost in the funnel: paid traffic arrived, watched a blank screen, and left before the hero image rendered. Conversion on mobile was less than half of desktop, which is backwards for their category.
What we did
We started with two weeks of measurement — real-user metrics, not lab scores — and found the load time wasn't one problem but four: a 2MB render-blocking app bundle, unoptimised hero imagery, synchronous tracking scripts, and a theme that re-rendered the cart on every page.
Rather than a risky replatform, we rebuilt the theme layer in place: a clean Online Store 2.0 theme with the six apps that earned their keep integrated natively, images moved to responsive formats with proper sizing, and every third-party script loaded after first paint.
The cutover happened on a Tuesday at 6am with a full rollback plan. Nobody needed it.
“Our Shopify store was loading in 8 seconds. After working with them, it's under 1.8. Revenue went up 34% that month — I genuinely didn't expect it to be that dramatic.”