Shopify Checkout Speed: Reducing Friction from Cart to Confirmation

Shopify’s checkout is the most optimised page in your store. Shopify spends enormous engineering effort making it fast. But there is still a meaningful range between a poorly configured checkout and a well-configured one, and the gap shows up directly in your conversion rate. This article covers what merchants on Shopify (and Shopify Plus) can do in 2026 to maximise checkout speed.

Why checkout speed matters more than any other page

Every 100 milliseconds added to checkout typically reduces conversion by about 1 percent. On a store doing $1 million AUD a year, that is $10,000 a year per 100ms. The math compounds. A 500ms checkout slowdown can cost a six-figure store $50,000 in lost revenue annually.

Unlike other Shopify pages, you cannot edit the checkout HTML on standard Shopify. But there are still meaningful levers.

Lever 1: Reduce checkout scripts

Shopify gives you the additional_scripts field in checkout.liquid (Plus only) and the Customer Events surface (all plans) to inject third-party scripts. Many merchants stuff this with analytics, attribution, ad pixels, and chat widgets.

Audit ruthlessly. The only scripts that should fire on checkout are those that drive conversion measurement or directly enable a payment method. Marketing pixels for upper-funnel ads can usually wait until thank-you. Chat widgets often have no business on a checkout page where buyers are mid-task.

Lever 2: Use Customer Events for tracking, not raw scripts

The Shopify Customer Events framework lets you load tracking scripts in a sandboxed worker context, isolated from the main checkout thread. Migrate every third-party tag to Customer Events. The performance benefit is significant on mobile, where main-thread work is the most expensive resource.

Lever 3: Express checkout buttons

Shop Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal Express. Each one bypasses several steps of the standard checkout flow. Buyers who use express checkout convert 30 to 50 percent better than those who do not.

Enable every express checkout method your buyers use. Place the buttons prominently on the product page and cart drawer. The fewer fields a buyer has to fill, the faster the checkout completes.

Lever 4: Shop Pay one-tap

Shop Pay returning buyers can complete checkout in a single tap. Make sure Shop Pay is enabled, prominently displayed, and that you are not suppressing the “Save my information” prompt for first-time buyers.

Stores with Shop Pay enabled and visible see 18 to 30 percent of mobile checkouts go through Shop Pay one-tap. The conversion rate on those checkouts is roughly 50 percent higher than email-and-card checkout.

Lever 5: Reduce checkout fields

Every optional field is a potential friction point. Audit your checkout settings:

• Phone number: is it actually required? If you do not call buyers, make it optional or remove it.
• Company name: necessary for B2B, removable for B2C.
• Address line 2: necessary for some markets, often hidden by default.
• Marketing consent checkbox: keep visible, but pre-check only where legally permitted.

Each removed or hidden field cuts checkout time by 5 to 15 seconds for first-time buyers.

Lever 6: Inventory and shipping calls

If you use real-time shipping rates from a carrier API (Australia Post, Sendle, FedEx), those API calls happen during checkout. If the carrier API is slow, your checkout is slow.

Cache shipping rates where you can. Use Shopify’s flat-rate or table-based shipping for most orders and only fall back to real-time rates for edge cases. Monitor carrier API latency monthly; if any one carrier consistently takes more than 500ms, look at alternatives.

Lever 7: Post-purchase upsells

Post-purchase upsells (offers shown between the payment confirmation and the thank-you page) can lift average order value, but they also add steps to the checkout flow. Test their impact: do they actually increase revenue per visitor, or do they slow down the thank-you page enough to offset the AOV gain?

For most stores, one post-purchase upsell is the sweet spot. Two or more begins to feel pushy and drops perceived store quality.

Plus-only levers

If you are on Shopify Plus, you have additional levers:

• Checkout Extensibility: build custom UI extensions that are sandboxed and performant.
• Functions API: server-side discount and shipping logic that runs faster than scripts.
• Custom payment methods: integrate locally-relevant methods (Afterpay, Zip) directly.

Our Sydney web development team works extensively with Shopify Plus Checkout Extensibility for Australian merchants. We have written about maximising web development ROI on the Shopify Plus tier and what to prioritise. For the full picture, see our guide on creating a seamless checkout experience on Shopify and WordPress.

How to measure checkout speed

Open the checkout in Chrome DevTools with mobile emulation and 4G throttling. Watch the Network tab. Time the moment from clicking Checkout to seeing the contact information form. Then time the second step. Then time the payment step.

If any step takes more than 1.5 seconds on throttled mobile, you have a speed problem on that step. Most issues are at step 1 (initial checkout load) where third-party scripts cause the most damage.

Checkout speed work has the highest ROI of any Shopify performance optimisation because the buyer is already deep in the funnel. Every second you save converts into revenue almost mechanically.

Want these checkout levers implemented for you? Talk to our Shopify developers — checkout speed work usually pays for itself within weeks.