70% Faster: Nanit’s Shopify Migration Off Focal

The problem

Nanit sells smart baby monitors to parents who research hard before they buy. The brand looked premium, but the store underneath it was slow. Pages took 5 to 6 seconds to load, navigation lagged, and every slow page undercut the trust the brand had built. Beyond Emails brought us in to fix the speed without touching the look.

What we found

The store sat on the Focal theme with years of apps and scripts layered on top. Everything loaded up front, whether the shopper needed it or not. Product pages carried the most weight: galleries, comparison tables, bundles and add-ons all fought for the first second of load time.

The decisions

• Keep custom work in its own layer. We built on an upgradable commercial base theme and kept every Nanit feature in a separate, typed codebase. Theme updates stay free, and an upgrade becomes a short list of conflicts, fixed one at a time.

• Draw the page first. Each page type inlines only the CSS its first screen needs. The full stylesheet loads in the background, scripts wait, and brand fonts are preloaded.

• Start sections only when they are needed. A section registry ties each section to its script, and a script only runs when its section scrolls near view.

• Rebuild the product page around one decision at a time. The gallery follows the chosen variant, comparison lives inline, and complex products get a guided multi-step path instead of one long form.

• Move promotion logic onto Shopify. Bundle and buy-more discounts run as Shopify Functions, so offers no longer depend on a third-party script loading in the browser.

What we shipped

A custom Harmony build with the same design Nanit already loved, a rebuilt product page, and a codebase the team can upgrade without fear. Layout shift is gone and mobile pages feel stable from the first tap.

The result

Page load dropped from 5 to 6 seconds to 1.5 seconds, more than 70% faster. Parents now move through the store without waiting on pages to load.

Where it leaves them

Nanit has a fast base to keep testing on. New sections plug into the registry, theme upgrades stay safe, and every future CRO test runs on a store that is no longer slowed down by its own code.