Lukas Tanasiuk once paid a company to redesign a Shopify site selling electric scooters, which resulted in slow-loading pages and, despite efforts to fix them, found many false claims.
“I’ve found that some people who claim to optimize for page speed are cheating,” he told me.
Page speed optimization became Tanasiuk’s next opportunity: in 2023, he launched The Nice Agency, which focuses on Shopify page loads.
He and I recently spoke about his journey from merchant to agency owner, his slow Shopify site, and more. The full audio of our conversation is embedded below. The transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Eric Bandholz: Please tell us about your job.
Lucas Tanasiuk: I’ve been a Shopify store owner since 2015. In 2020, I launched a click and mortar store in Vancouver, Canada selling personal motorized vehicles including electric scooters, electric skates, unicycles and electric unicycles.
We grew it quickly. We paid to redesign the site, but the download speeds were extremely slow. In our efforts to improve the speed, I discovered a fraud among those who claim to optimize page speed. I fell in love with it.
I realized there was very little doing good work in this space at a fair price, so I decided this was my next opportunity. I launched The Nice Agency in 2023 and have been scaling ever since, focusing solely on speed optimization for Shopify sites.
Clients bring us non-native Shopify sites that are incredibly slow. They work great, but they load slowly. Shopify works a lot like Apple: if you work within Shopify’s tight ecosystem, performance is great. But as soon as you insert an external component, performance starts to degrade.
All apps in the Shopify space are third-party code. You can’t edit them. The developers don’t want you to be able to change their code. Some apps render pages on their own servers, then re-render them on the user’s page.
The simple answer is, build something natively on Shopify. If the cost is not too high and the scope of the project is not too large, then do so. We build directly into themes, we don’t build apps.
Bandholz: How much does it cost?
Tanasyuk: It depends on the project – we’ve done work to add features to existing rebuilds for $2,000.
A killer is something that replaces an entire component. It’s a good idea to remove components that aren’t used much instead of replacing them. Examples are A/B testing and review widgets. If you have less than $5 million in online revenue, you probably don’t need them. A/B Testing.
Use common sense. Buy from your own site. Browse your own site. Watch your conversion rates. Don’t be afraid to make changes without relying on data. Measure and analyze Over time, you won’t need expensive software.
I’m currently optimizing a client’s main product page, where the primary visual asset is a high-quality 45-second video explaining the product. Core Web VitalsThis is the maximum contentful painting metric.
The first thing that loads is a video. The client has attached 6 conversion optimization apps to the product page, as well as an A/B testing app. The page takes 25 seconds to fully load. This is awful. Shopify’s gold standard page speed is under 3 seconds.
In my experience, still images with good copy and a clear call to action usually More Better than videos and carousels. Download a heatmap or tracking tool. Very few visitors watch videos for more than a few seconds or click on multiple images in a carousel. Most visitors only look at static images. Plus, optimized images have no impact on page speed, which means you’re losing money on both videos and carousels.
My background is as an e-commerce operator. As an operator, my goal is to improve the customer experience. A fast loading website is essential. Many apps do the opposite. Unfortunately, many developers want to make a quick buck and promise faster sites.
Bandholz: Can you give an example?
Tanasyuk: This was last fall. I posted (and then removed) a video on my page from a company making false promises about page speed. I partnered with a talented developer, Jake Casto, from Proton Agency in New York City. He provided technical expertise and I provided a non-technical founder’s perspective.
A customer had just installed the company’s app and asked my opinion. I went to the company’s site and the first thing they advertised was that Shopify would instantly give you a performance score of 90-95. This is impossible. This was a huge red flag.
I spent weeks asking around with coworkers and digging deeper until I came across Jake Kast, who commented that they were dishonest.
He asked me to help expose these guys, and we had multiple calls with the head of Shopify, and other people at Shopify spoke directly with Google’s performance team, and they confirmed that everything we uncovered was true.
So Jake and I wrote a report, contacted the CEO of the company and said, “We’ve noticed some pretty strange stuff going on, so we’re writing a report on you guys. We’ll send it to you guys before we publish it, and you can write your responses and we’ll add them to our report.”
Within hours, all mention of improving the performance score was removed from the website, and the founders deleted all tweets relating to the performance score going back years.
The lesson for merchants is this: when seeking speed optimization for your Shopify site, be on the lookout for red flags. Beware of big promises and cheap, overnight fixes.
Bandholz: Where can we find you?
Tanasyuk: I Igovircas I’m in X. Me too. LinkedInOur website is Nice Agency.
