A Case Study in Speed
A client approached us in October with a common problem. Their Salla store was loading slowly, and they knew it was affecting sales. What they did not know was exactly how much. Their PageSpeed Insights score was 14 on mobile. That is not a typo. Fourteen out of one hundred.
The store sold women's fashion in Saudi Arabia. Good products, competitive prices, regular Instagram marketing. But visitors would click through from Instagram, wait for the page to load, and leave before seeing any products. Bounce rate was at 73%.
Diagnosing the Real Problems
The first thing we did was run a detailed performance audit. Here is what we found:
- Product images averaged 2.3MB each. Some were over 5MB.
- The theme loaded 47 different JavaScript files, many of them unused.
- No caching was configured. Every page load was served fresh.
- Third-party tracking scripts were blocking the main content from rendering.
- Web fonts were loading from external servers with no fallback.
None of these issues were obvious from just looking at the store. It looked fine. But under the hood, it was a mess.
The Optimization Process
We approached the optimization in three phases. First, images. We compressed every product and banner image while maintaining visual quality. Average image size dropped from 2.3MB to 180KB. That alone took the score from 14 to 31.
Second, code cleanup. We identified which features the store actually used and removed unused JavaScript. We consolidated CSS files and implemented critical CSS inline loading. Score jumped to 48.
Third, infrastructure. We configured browser caching, enabled GZIP compression, and moved third-party scripts to load asynchronously. Final score: 67.
The Results That Actually Matter
A PageSpeed score is just a number. What matters is business impact. Here is what changed in the 30 days after optimization:
- Bounce rate dropped from 73% to 49%
- Average session duration increased by 42%
- Conversion rate went from 1.1% to 2.4%
- Monthly revenue increased by approximately 85,000 SAR
The client's comment was simple: "Why did nobody tell us about this before?"
What You Can Check Right Now
Go to pagespeed.web.dev and test your store. If your mobile score is below 50, you are losing money every day. Check your largest images, count your JavaScript files, and see if your servers are sending proper cache headers. These are the basics, but most stores get them wrong.
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