Lifnex: A Custom Shopify Theme for an Audio Brand, from a 31 to a 98 Mobile Lighthouse Score

The store ran on a heavy pre-built theme with a stack of app scripts.

On mobile it scored 31 out of 100 on Lighthouse, its largest contentful paint took 4.6 seconds and failed Core Web Vitals, it shipped 2.8 MB of JavaScript, the page jumped as it loaded (a layout shift of 0.380),

• taps took 420 ms to respond, and the server took 820 ms to render each page's Liquid.

• Custom Liquid sections. Reusable sections written in native Liquid, and 14 app store scripts replaced with features built into the theme.
• Fast first paint. The hero product photo loaded with Shopify's image tag at high fetch priority, AVIF and WebP served through the Shopify CDN, and above-the-fold CSS inlined in the layout templates.
• Less JavaScript. jQuery, polyfills and redundant trackers removed, sliders, drawers and tabs rebuilt as vanilla web components, and the spec-comparison code loaded only on product pages.
• Faster server rendering. Nested product loops in the collection grid refactored, snippets written to cache well, and audio specifications read directly from product metafields.
• Instant interactions. Long tasks broken up during filter interactions, spec accordions built in pure CSS, and colour and variant switching driven by data attributes.
• A page that holds still. Fixed aspect ratios on every media container, font-display swap with fallback font metrics matched, and reserved space for spec sheets and ratings.

• Sources:
• Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse v11 mobile audits (score, first contentful paint, total blocking time), Chrome UX Report field data and WebPageTest (largest contentful paint), Google Search Console Core Web Vitals and the Chrome UX Report (interaction to next paint), PageSpeed Insights and the WebPageTest filmstrip (layout shift), Chrome DevTools network waterfall and bundle analysis (JavaScript payload), and Shopify Theme Inspector for Liquid (server render time).
• The Lighthouse score and total blocking time are lab measurements; the Core Web Vitals figures come from field data.

It carries about an eighth of the JavaScript it used to, and every Core Web Vital now passes.

What this says about shakalakaa: we build Shopify stores in native Liquid, with speed and stability designed in rather than patched on, for brands whose customers shop on their phones. Our e-commerce marketing page sets out how the store and the advertising work together.

Groups based in the capital brief the same build team through web design in Kuala Lumpur.

Further north it runs as web design in Penang. Brands in Iskandar read web design in Johor Bahru.