Keep your storefront fast

When you finish, your homepage stays quick on a phone: light motion, compressed hero media, and optional features loaded only when you use them. Studio Arcana idle-defers decorative motion and engagement work (lookbooks, portfolio, marquees, magnetic CTAs) so marketplace-ready stores stay fast as you add booking, specialists, and retail — without turning those features off.

Motion defaults that protect speed

Online Store → Themes → Customize → Theme settings → Motion

1. Set Motion intensity to Subtle.
2. Set Magnetic CTAs to Off.
3. Set Smooth momentum scroll to Off unless you deliberately want Lenis-style scrolling.
4. Set Default page transition to None (or Fade for a soft cross-fade).
5. Keep Media pulse Off unless you need it on Video or Testimonials.
6. Confirm Animations off and OS reduced motion still disable heavy effects.

Hero and gallery media

• Use compressed hero images sized for the banner; avoid huge uncropped uploads.
• Add a poster image if you use hero video.
• Prefer lazy loading for below-the-fold galleries; keep the first viewport image eager.
• Place Image banner as the first section only when it should be the Largest Contentful Paint element — later banners lazy-load automatically.
• Leave Preload heading font off unless the heading itself is your Largest Contentful Paint element.
• On Portfolio gallery and Lookbook, use Progressive load / Load more when you have many pieces so shoppers do not download the full grid at once.
• Give every image meaningful alt text for accessibility and SEO.

Optional features and third parties

• Turn off unused advanced effects, sticky stacks, and engagement extras you are not using.
• Load booking apps, GTM, and marketing pixels only when consent and setup are ready.
• Prefer Conversion Starter homepage presets when you want a short, launch-safe first publish; save Full Editorial density for content-rich demos.
• 3D model viewers load only when a model enters the viewport or the shopper interacts with model media.
• Theme scripts already skip product JS on generic pages and defer below-fold lookbook/portfolio setup until near the viewport.

How to check it worked

• Homepage loads cleanly on a phone — the hero appears quickly.
• Turn Animations off in the storefront utility toggle — heavy motion stops.
• Ask your implementer to run Lighthouse on home, product, collection, search, and cart after publish with the storefront password off (targets: LCP under 2.5s, CLS under 0.1; performance score and TBT are soft warnings because Shopify apps and pixels vary).
• See the Full launch checklist for the complete accessibility and performance QA list.