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Industry Insight

Shopify Developer vs Speed Specialist: Which Do You Need?

Understanding the key differences to make the right hiring decision for your store.

The Key Difference

While both work with Shopify stores, their expertise and focus areas are fundamentally different:

  • Shopify Developers: Build features, customize themes, integrate apps
  • Speed Specialists: Optimize existing code, improve performance metrics, reduce load times

Shopify Developer Strengths

What Developers Excel At:

Custom feature development and functionality
Theme customization and design implementation
App integrations and API connections
Checkout customization and upsells

Where Developers May Fall Short:

Deep performance optimization expertise
Core Web Vitals and Lighthouse optimization
Advanced JavaScript and CSS optimization
Image optimization and lazy loading strategies

Speed Specialist Strengths

What Speed Specialists Excel At:

Improving Lighthouse Performance scores
Optimizing Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS)
Eliminating render blocking resources
Reducing JavaScript bundle size
Image and asset optimization strategies

Where Speed Specialists May Fall Short:

Building custom features from scratch
Major theme redesigns
Complex app development

When to Hire Each

Hire a Shopify Developer When:

  • You need new features or functionality built
  • You're launching a new store or major redesign
  • You need custom app integrations
  • You want checkout customization

Hire a Speed Specialist When:

  • Your Lighthouse score is below 50
  • Pages take more than 3 seconds to load
  • You're losing customers due to slow speeds
  • Your Google Search Console shows speed issues
  • You've added many apps and site feels sluggish

Cost Comparison

Pricing varies significantly based on scope:

  • Shopify Developers: £50-150/hour for custom development work
  • Speed Specialists: £99-349 for fixed-scope optimization packages

The Hybrid Approach

Ideally, work with both:

  1. Have a developer build your features and customize your theme
  2. Then hire a speed specialist to optimize the final result
  3. Maintain speed optimization quarterly as you add features

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