Audeze: Shopify Platform Overhaul

## The Brief Audeze make some of the world's finest planar magnetic headphones — a product with a dedicated, technically demanding customer base. Their Shopify store had grown organically over several years, accumulating bolt-on apps, overridden theme files, and custom JavaScript that was never intended to coexist. The symptoms were hard to ignore: a Lighthouse mobile performance score of 34, a Largest Contentful Paint of 5.2 seconds, and a product filtering experience that frequently broke on Safari. The engineering team knew there was a problem, but the store was live and revenue-generating — touching it felt risky. They came to us for a clean, structured overhaul. ## What We Found Our first step was a full audit. We documented every app installed, every theme file that had been customised, and every piece of JavaScript running on page load. What we found was a common pattern in long-running Shopify stores: - **12 third-party apps** loading scripts on every page, regardless of whether the page used them - **3 overlapping filtering solutions** — an app, a custom Liquid implementation, and a legacy script — all partially active - **No image optimisation pipeline**: product images were being served at original upload resolution (some over 4MB per image) - **Render-blocking scripts** in the `` preventing any visible content from loading until 4+ external resources had been fetched The core Liquid theme was also unmaintainable. Critical layout logic was spread across 34 template overrides with no consistent naming convention. ## What We Built ### Theme Architecture Refactor We rebuilt the theme architecture from scratch, keeping the visual design intact but rationalising the component structure. Every section and snippet was renamed to a consistent convention and documented. The result was a codebase any developer could understand on day one. We removed 8 of the 12 third-party apps by replacing their functionality with native Shopify features or lightweight custom implementations. Where apps were retained, we moved their scripts to load `defer` or `async` — none of them needed to block rendering. ### Product Filtering The existing filtering system was causing the most user-facing pain. We rebuilt it using [Shopify's Search & Discovery API](https://shopify.dev/docs/api/storefront/latest/queries/search), which provides faceted filtering natively without any app dependency. The new implementation: - AJAX-based — no full page reload when filters change - URL-state synced — filtered views are shareable and bookmarkable - Keyboard accessible — fully navigable without a mouse - Zero external JS dependency ### Fulfilment Stack Integration Audeze use ShipBob for fulfilment. The existing integration was handled by a third-party app that was polling the Shopify API on a cron and had a 15-minute lag on inventory updates. We replaced this with a direct webhook integration: Shopify fires a webhook on order creation, our handler processes it and creates the ShipBob shipment, and updates order metafields with tracking data. Real-time, no polling, no lag. ### Performance With structural changes in place, we focused on performance: - All product and collection images migrated to Shopify's CDN with explicit `width` and `height` attributes set, eliminating CLS - Hero images lazy-loaded with `fetchpriority="high"` on the above-the-fold asset - `font-display: swap` added to all custom font declarations - All remaining JavaScript moved to `defer` Final Lighthouse mobile score: **98 performance, 100 accessibility**. ## The Outcome The store launched on a Sunday night. By Monday morning, the Audeze team had data showing the improvement in page speed. By the end of the week, conversion rate had lifted. More importantly, the engineering team now has a codebase they can maintain. New features are added to a documented, consistent architecture. Adding or removing an app no longer risks breaking an unrelated part of the store. > "The difference was immediate. Three seconds off the load time, and our conversion rate lifted within the first week. Ten Peaks understood our product and built with that customer in mind." > — Alex Petitpas, Head of E-Commerce, Audeze