As an avid Shopify shop owner, I constantly trial different apps in hopes to discover new ways to better convert and serve customers. To my disappointment, I have removed many apps due to the slowness ramifications or effect on download speeds, inhibiting a visitor’s experience.
The easiest way to test an app’s effect on speed is to take advantage of an online tool such as Pingdom’s Website Speed Test. Nobody likes a slow website, and multiple Shopify apps can severely slow down a store. Check out this article to learn how a slow website may affect users and search engine rankings.
Some apps have single handily added full seconds to our page’s download, which is totally unacceptable. When groups of apps are combined, they can foster a cumbersome experience. Since many Shopify owners likely rely on many apps, our Shopify App Size Chart might influence which apps you select to work together as a group.
We add up the size of all known images, files, and scripts associated with each app. Some apps point to third-party locations for several reasons (like fonts), and those are sometimes difficult to track and may be overlooked. These measurements were completed in July 2015. App makers do have control over file sizes and may improve as time goes by. Also, please remember that file sizes do paint a complete picture but are still important nonetheless. Let’s get started shall we?
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Shipping
Good news for shipping apps. Most of them do not affect website speed.
| App | File(s) Size | Requests | Grade |
| Aftership | 0 | 0 | No Impact |
| Aftership provides the tracking and transit details every step of the way to storeowners and their customers. | |||
| Shippo | 0 | 0 | No Impact |
| Shippo does not affect the download speeds or front side of your online business. | |||
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Marketing
| App | File(s) Size | Requests | Grade |
| Better Coupon Box | 443.9 KB | 15 | Heavy |
| Better Coupon Box allows you to add a pop up box to encourage people to like your company in various social networks. With 15 separate files for download totaling 443.9KB, I would never use this app for our store. Also, when you uninstall the app, some files seem to remain. | |||
| Email Offers | 0 | 0 | No Impact |
| Email Offers allows storeowners to consistently contact new customers, inactive accounts, great customers and more for little to no bandwidth cost. | |||
| Instagrammy | 32.5 | 1 | Light |
| I like Instagrammy, but I personally decided showing instagram photos on one page did not warrant adding 32KB to every single page on our website. | |||
| Mailchimp For Shopify | 0 | 0 | No Impact |
| The email marketing king, Mailchimp, doesn’t seem to add anything to your shop’s front end. | |||
| Plug In SEO | 0 | 0 | No Impact |
| This app does not seem to add any files to your storefront. We are unclear why you would download this app when so many free tools online are available though. | |||
| Pop-Up Window | 16.4 KB | 2 | Light |
| Pop-Up Window notifies your visitors about sales and promotions or captures newsletter and mailing list signups, and it is very lightweight. | |||
| Receiptly | 4.9 KB | 4 | Light |
| Receiptly improves email receipts, but it is interesting that it still adds files to your shop’s front end even as insignificant as it is. | |||
| Smart Popup Box | n/a | n/a | n/a |
| Very few recent reviewers were still using the app making this difficult for testing. Also, many people were complaining about this app not being mobile friendly. We are still locating dependable sources for testing. | |||
| Soundest | 75.4 KB | n/a | Medium |
| Soundest is an email marketing app for Shopify. 75K is not too bad at all and equals to maybe one medium sized full color image (JPG). | |||
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Sales
| App | File(s) Size | Requests | Grade |
| Better Recommend | 6.9 KB | 3 | Light |
| We tested home and product pages for this slim recommendation app on Shopify. | |||
| Picreel | 18.5 KB | 3 | Light |
| To improve conversions and abandoned carts, Picreel offers a fairly lightweight popup solution. | |||
| Product Options (Bold) | 74.3 KB | 3 | Medium |
| Product options allow you to create options outside of variants. Bold also hosts a number of other apps that will probably not add further files or requests to your webpage. | |||
| Quick View | 33.5 KB | 3 | Light |
| Quickview gives shoppers quick access to product previews in one click without reloading the whole site. For only 33 KB, it might be worth it. | |||
| ReCharge | 33.8 KB | 2 | Light |
| Recharge allows businesses to charge subscription-based products. The developers manage to keep this app very light. | |||
| SocialShopWave | 75.2 KB | 7 | Medium |
| SocialShopWave is one of Shopify’s most popular social-oriented apps that is fairly light in weight compared to the many services offered. | |||
| Yotpo Social Reviews | 91.2 KB | 10 | Medium |
| Research shows reviews improve conversions, and 91.2 KB seems to be a fair tradeoff. If you ever uninstall the app, remember to remove the code you manually input during installation or it will linger forever. | |||
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Reporting
| App | File(s) Size | Requests | Grade |
| Lucky Orange for Shopify | 123 KB | 18 | Medium |
| Lucky Orange is a pretty nifty app that offers heat maps, live chat, polls, and recordings of visitors for a better understanding of user behavior. A little hefty in weight; you might be able to trade other apps for this one. We might be missing some font files because this app slowed our website by at least one full second on every test. | |||
| Vantage | 0 | 0 | No Impact |
| Vantage uses Google Analytics and your order/customer data and has no impact on the customer side of your store. | |||
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Tools
| App | File(s) Size | Requests | Grade |
| Persistent Cart | 0 | 0 | No Impact |
| Only affects visitors who are logged in. Persistent Cart allows people to save items in the cart when logged in and retrieve them from a different computer or browser. | |||
| Zapier | 0 | 0 | No Impact |
| The Zapier app works more as a signup mechanism rather than a storefront application. This app should affect your store minimally. | |||
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Customer Service
| App | File(s) Size | Requests | Grade |
| Formilla Live Chat | 14.4 KB | 3 | Light |
| Formilla Live Chat seems to be the lightest solution for online chatting with Shopify. | |||
| Improved Contact Form | 4 KB | 2 | Light |
| We are still investigating this app further, but the Improved Contact Form doesn’t seem to impact an entire website very much at all. | |||
| Olark Live Chat + CartSaver | 186.86 KB | 17 | Medium |
| Online chats are important to some shop owners, but the feature will slow an entire website down. | |||
| Tidio Live Chat | 136.1 KB | 8 | Medium |
| Tidio seems to be a relatively low-weight and attractive solution for adding an instant online chat system to a storefront. | |||
Call to other developers: Your input is welcome. Please contact Chris at chris[at]printkeg[dot]com if you disagree with our findings.
Attention store owners: If you would like us to test an app’s influence on download speed that is not listed, please contact Chris at chris[at]printkeg[dot]com.
More reviews will be available soon.
