Issue 234 - The Big 9 of Shopify Site Speed: Start by Auditing and Cutting Apps

The Big 9 of Shopify Site Speed: Start by Auditing and Cutting Apps

Izaac Barratt kicks off a 9-part series on Shopify site speed with the highest-leverage starting point: apps. Three approaches in order of effort -- consolidate redundant apps (easy), defer non-critical app scripts to load after page content (medium), and work directly with app partners to fix the bloat at the source (hard). He includes a Google Sheets template for doing a proper app audit, with overlap detection built in.

By Izaac Barratt

Preorders, Selling Plans, and AI Ops with Sandesh Kulai

In this episode of the Liquid Weekly Podcast, hosts Karl Meisterheim and Taylor Page are joined by Sandesh Kulai, founder of STOQ by Artos Software. Sandesh shares his journey from building early Shopify apps to working at Shopify, then returning to app development full-time with Artos Software. The conversation dives into the real complexity behind preorders, back-in-stock alerts, selling plans, deferred payments, storefront integrations, and supporting apps across a wide range of Shopify themes.

By Liquid Weekly

Should We Still Be Using SCSS in Shopify Themes in 2026?

Christopher Dodd asks whether SCSS and build tooling still make sense for Shopify themes now that modern CSS has caught up. Shopify stopped compiling SCSS server-side back in 2019, and their own reference themes (Dawn and Horizon) deliberately avoid it -- a fairly clear signal. Dodd recently inherited a project buried under Babel, ESLint, Husky, PostCSS, Webpack, and Tailwind, which eventually became uneditable and had to be rebuilt from scratch on Horizon. His take: there is a point where tooling causes more problems than it solves, especially on Shopify where themes get handed off to businesses without full engineering teams. He opens the floor to where others stand.

By Christopher Dodd

How to Debug and Fix CLS in a Shopify App with Chrome DevTools

Farid Movsumov (Craftshift) walks through his full workflow for diagnosing and fixing Cumulative Layout Shift in a Shopify app, bringing it down to zero. The process: reproduce the CLS issue, record the page timeline with Chrome DevTools Performance tab, identify which elements are shifting and why, apply a fix on a separate branch, and verify. He also covers why you need to test across different app states -- first install, onboarding incomplete, onboarding complete.

By Craftshift

Krown Themes' Monthly Stack: $2,200/Month with $1,500 Going to AI Tools

Ruben Bristian (Shopify Build Award Winner, co-founder at Krown Themes) shares their full monthly operational spend. Total comes to around $2,200/month, with nearly $1,500 being AI-related -- development (Claude Code, Cursor), support (Help Scout, kapa.ai at $1,100), and more. He pushes back on the 'SaaS is dead, vibe code everything' crowd, noting he'd still rather pay for well-built products from people who deeply understand the problem.

By Ruben Bristian

Shopify Quietly Switched from /llms.txt to /agents.md Across All Stores

Sam Wright breaks down Shopify's shift from /llms.txt to /agents.md: two weeks after rolling out llms.txt, Shopify is now redirecting it to /agents.md at the server level across every store. The distinction matters -- llms.txt is a discovery file telling agents what a store sells, while agents.md is a transaction interface describing how to use UCP, add to cart, and trigger checkout. Agents.md is an open standard backed by the Linux Foundation with 60,000+ projects already using it. For now the file isn't editable and there's no evidence it's being actively consumed by agents, but the direction is worth watching.

By Sam Wright

Expiring Offline Access Tokens Required for All Public Apps by January 1, 2027

Starting January 1, 2027, all public Shopify apps must use expiring offline access tokens when calling the Admin API -- non-expiring tokens will trigger authentication errors after that date. This extends the April 2026 rule (previously only for newly created apps) to all existing public apps. Custom apps and merchant-created apps are unaffected. If your app uses Shopify's official libraries and templates, refresh handling is already built in -- you just need to handle the token exchange and storage.

By Shopify