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Four storefronts,
and the numbers behind them.

Every store below is live, was written from an empty folder rather than reskinned, and reports its own theme name — so you can check the claim yourself in about five seconds.

Measured 2026-08-24 · by SPELL

How to verify any of this without taking our word for it

Open any store below, then in your browser console type Shopify.theme.name. A store on a marketplace theme answers Dawn, Refresh, or a purchased theme's name. These answer with their own. That single check is the difference between "custom" and "customised".

How these numbers were taken

Not a Lighthouse screenshot. Each storefront was loaded in a real Chrome instance over the debugging protocol, emulating a mid-range Android on a throttled connection — a 412 px viewport, 4× CPU slowdown and roughly Fast 3G — which is the closest honest proxy for the phone your customers actually hold. LCP and CLS are read from the browser's own PerformanceObserver, the same source Google uses.

Google's thresholds are LCP ≤ 2.5s and CLS ≤ 0.1. All four pass both. What we would point at first is the CLS column: zero on every store. Layout shift is the cheapest thing to get wrong on Shopify and the most annoying to a shopper — it is why people tap the wrong variant — and it is almost entirely a consequence of how the theme is written.


STUNER

Streetwear · Cairo · stuner.co

A premium streetwear label designed in Cairo and made in Egypt.

Apparel lives or dies on the product page. The build puts the garment first — large imagery, structured size and fit information, and a variant picker that does not shift the layout when a colour changes. The theme is called Static because nothing on the page is allowed to move once it has painted.

468 msLCP · passes
0CLS · zero shift
253 KBPage weight
14Third-party requests

Theme reported by the storefront: Static


KROVIO

Direct-to-consumer · krovio.co

A bespoke storefront built on its own theme, KROVIO 1.0.

The theme name is the point: this is not a marketplace theme renamed. It was written for this catalogue, which is why the whole storefront ships in ~209KB with 28 third-party requests and still paints in under half a second on a throttled phone.

480 msLCP · passes
0CLS · zero shift
209 KBPage weight
28Third-party requests

Theme reported by the storefront: KROVIO 1.0


Kiddil

Personalised print-on-demand · kiddil.com

Personalised storybooks where the child is the hero — add a name and a photo.

The hard part was the personalisation flow: a customer supplies a name and a photograph before they can see what they are buying. That is a lot of state to hold on a product page without the layout jumping around while it loads. It ships the lightest page of the four — 68KB total.

2372 msLCP · passes
0CLS · zero shift
68 KBPage weight
21Third-party requests

Theme reported by the storefront: Kiddil — Wonder & Play


Peel & Plug

Bilingual · English + Arabic · peelplug.com

Waterproof vinyl laptop stickers, fridge magnets and sticker packs, sold in Egypt.

A genuinely bilingual storefront — English and Arabic, right-to-left where it should be, from one codebase rather than two mirrored themes that drift apart. This is the build behind everything on our Arabic & RTL page: it is a discipline, not a stylesheet flip.

1036 msLCP · passes
0CLS · zero shift
246 KBPage weight
35Third-party requests

Theme reported by the storefront: Peel & Plug — Sticker Shop


What these four do not prove

They are small brands. Three of the four sell in Egypt, in EGP, at volumes no one would call enterprise. If you need a case study with a household name and an eight-figure GMV attached, we do not have one and we are not going to invent one.

What they do prove is narrower and, for choosing a developer, more useful: that the storefront in front of you was written rather than assembled, that it holds together on a cheap phone on a bad connection, and that the person who wrote it measured it afterwards.

Want yours measured the same way?

Send your store URL. We will run the same instrumentation on it before we speak, and come to the call with your real LCP, CLS and the app or theme file causing each one.

Book a call →

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