Simple Find

Simple Find sells natural leather bags made in Italy and premium women's clothing. Its Italian brands include Mangotti, Anna Luchini, Luisa Vannini and Roberta M. The store was already built, with the homepage and core pages in place. The team wanted a better product experience and product options that were easier to manage.

The brief covered a metafields implementation and a new product swatch structure, released as part of a theme update. After launch, the brief grew. The team asked us to find and fix a sharp drop in interaction speed on the live store, without changing the styling.

The product swatch structure needed reworking. The team wanted swatches driven by metafields, so product options would be clearer for shoppers and simpler to keep accurate.

After the July 31st theme update, interaction speed collapsed. Shopify's real user reports showed INP rising from about 90ms to over 1000ms. That put the store in the Poor category, especially on mobile, where taps and clicks felt frozen.

Collection pages were heavy. They rendered 500+ products at once. Combined with scroll and resize listeners that blocked the main thread, the browser froze when people tried to interact with the page.

Products were also being rendered twice. The availability filter that hid out-of-stock products forced the browser to draw the collection a second time, on pages that were already large.

Every fix had to keep the look intact. The team had run their own audit, listed the defects, and asked for fixes that did not change the styling.

• 01 Metafield swatches in three Liquid files We implemented metafields and reworked the product swatch structure so swatches pull from product data. The goal was a clearer product experience and options the team could keep up to date. The whole change lived in three Liquid files. We added no JavaScript for it, which mattered later when we checked what was slowing the store down.
• 02 Theme update to version 2.0.1 The swatch work shipped alongside a theme update from v1.0.9 to v2.0.1. We built and checked everything on a preview theme first, so the live store stayed untouched until the new version was ready. Once the team confirmed it was all fixed, they gave the go ahead and we put the preview live on July 31st.
• 03 Tracing the INP spike to global.js Shopify's real user reports showed INP jumping from about 90ms to over 1000ms right after the update. We audited the code and found the cause in global.js, the theme's core file, inside the sticky header and announcement bar code. It came in with the v1.0.9 to v2.0.1 theme update, not the swatch work. We fixed it, and the team saw the store improve, though not fully.
• 04 Removing duplicated per-card CSS The team shared a defects document from their own audit and asked us to handle two fixes without changing the styling. We removed duplicated per-card CSS that sat on top of the same rules already coming from global settings. With 500+ products on a collection page, that repeated CSS added up fast.
• 05 Dropping the availability filter The team spotted that the availability filter, which hid out-of-stock products, was forcing the browser to render collection products twice. They asked us to remove it, and we took it off the live site. Collection pages now render once, which takes a second pass of work off the store's biggest pages.
• 06 Speed changes tested, then merged live We made further performance changes to the code in a duplicate speed optimization theme, so the team could test them without touching the live store. The team checked it on a preview link and told us it was fine to put live. We merged the code into the live theme, closing out the issues the team had raised.