GoWith: fixing storefront performance while improving shopping and multichannel operations

The request

GoWith is a US brand that designs and manufactures socks for a wide range of styles and tastes. When the store team reached out, their first concern was performance: the storefront’s Core Web Vitals were poor on several fronts and pages took noticeably long to load, especially on first visit. Beyond that, they had a list of shopping-experience improvements and were selling the same inventory on Amazon and Etsy, which created operational work.

My role

I worked as Shopify developer and consultant on the existing store, with the brand’s SEO specialist and store manager. There was no designer on the project; the team described what they needed and we iterated on real pages in short cycles.

Performance work

The performance problems had the usual causes: assets loading in the wrong order, images loading eagerly whether or not they were visible, oversized Liquid and JavaScript files, and apps adding more weight than the function they provided. The work I did:

• Image loading. Lazy loading for banner and product images below the fold, with the loading order adjusted so the main content image is not delayed by secondary assets.
• JavaScript sequencing. Scripts reordered and deferred so that rendering is not blocked by code that only matters after interaction.
• Liquid cleanup. Liquid code that caused delays was refactored or rewritten following Shopify’s documented best practices, removing unnecessary loops and lookups.
• Splitting and minifying. Liquid and JavaScript files that did not follow best practices were split into smaller units and minified.
• App weight. The Yotpo integration was migrated to its current version so it would contribute less to load time rather than more.

Changes were made in response to the SEO specialist’s findings and verified on the live store. Load times improved markedly on both first and repeat visits.

Shopping experience

• Filter-aware variant images. On collection pages, filtering by color now shows each product card with the matching color variant selected, instead of the default image.
• Product feature icons. A structure on the product page that lets the team show product properties as icons, managed from the editor.
• Home page. Sections built from the store manager’s requests with editor settings, and the home page reworked for mobile.
• Bundles and upsells. A bundle app integrated with its own pages, and upsell/cross-sell areas on the product page, cart, checkout and thank-you page.
• Reviews. Customer reviews pulled from Amazon and Etsy and displayed on the home and product pages.
• Competitor review. Analysis of comparable stores, discussed with the team, with useful patterns adopted.

Operations and measurement

• Multichannel inventory. Integration of tools that manage stock jointly across Shopify, Amazon and Etsy, so the three channels work from consistent quantities.
• Custom events. Unique triggers in the theme for Google Analytics custom events, and custom pixels for other tracking tools used by the team.
• On-site SEO changes as requested by the SEO specialist.

What changed for the team

A faster storefront, a collection experience that shows customers the variant they filtered for, bundles and upsells in place, measurement the SEO team can rely on, and inventory that no longer has to be reconciled by hand between marketplaces and the store.