There are plenty of good reasons to choose Shopify over any other e-commerce platform. The ease of use, the scalability and also code-wise it's quite efficient and lightweight, if you manage to reduce unused Javascript from 3rd party apps. And these apps can sum up quite quickly resulting in an overloaded store with a lot of clutter nobody uses.
Often specific apps are only required on product pages, cart, homepage or content pages but rarely on all of those.
Not always easy to do as most apps got installed for a reason, this is although the most effective way to get rid of all the Javascript from the specific Shopify app.
Each app comes with its own Javascript and mostly libraries like jQuery are loaded twice even though two or more apps could share them. But as every app wants to be independent, which is quite good, it comes with quite a lot of kilobytes added to your store.
You could also write your own rules to strip out all the loaded Javascript files in the Shopify content where not needed. But that requires quite some knowledge and/or a developer at hand to adjust the code if new apps get installed or old ones change.
We have helped hundreds of Shopify stores to reduce unused Javascript with one simple but powerful app: Flashspeed Pagespeed Optimizer. It detects all 3rd party Javascript loaded into your Shopify store and gives you control on which pages to load or block it.
