Where they started
A Shopify store selling fashion accessories, ranking fine but converting poorly from organic. The collection pages (where the money is) were the slowest thing on the site: 4.6s LCP on mobile, because 43 apps injected their scripts on every template whether the page used them or not. One review widget alone loaded on the checkout, the blog, and every collection it had nothing to do with. Traffic wasn’t the problem; the pages people landed on were thin, generic, and heavy, so they bounced before the grid rendered.
What we did
- Ran an app diet, 43 down to 19. We audited every app for what it actually did versus what it cost in render-blocking script, cut or replaced two-thirds of them, and moved the survivors off the global theme where they didn’t belong. Collections LCP dropped to 1.9s.
- Fixed the theme, not just the apps. Deferred non-critical JS, set proper image dimensions to kill layout shift, and lazy-loaded below-the-fold collection grids so the first screen paints fast.
- Mapped keywords collection-first. We matched real commercial queries to the money collections and wrote genuine copy for each. Not a paragraph of filler under the grid, but intro text that answers what buyers ask before they buy.
- Built 22 links to the collections that mattered, from accessories trade press and gift-guide roundups, so the pages we’d optimized had the authority to hold their new positions.
Traffic rose a modest 60% over six months. We kept it that way on purpose. The point of this engagement was never the sessions number; it was that a faster, clearer collection page turned the same visitors into buyers. Revenue attributed to collection landings grew 90% on that gentle traffic curve.