Migrating to 2.0: How we improved Tuft & Paw’s mobile speed by 95%

Tuft & Paw calls itself a cat-first brand, meaning it’s raising the standards of cat products by focusing on behavioral research, modern design, and quality. With a good amount of traffic coming in regularly, founder Jackson Cunningham wanted help capitalizing on his visitors by increasing the website’s page speed.

+95.7% page speed on mobile homepage
+119% page speed on desktop homepage
+65% page speed on mobile PDP
+91.7% page speed on desktop PDP

Image of a white cat standing on top of a cat bed. The cat bed is on a hardwood floor. The background is white.

Client	Tuft & Paw
Industry	Pets
Website	tuftandpaw.com

Fuel Made's Role

Migration to Shopify 2.0
Custom Development

Tuft + Paw homepage on desktop and mobile.

The challenge

Slow website performance affecting conversions

Tuft & Paw’s existing Shopify theme had accumulated technical debt over time, resulting in long load times. For a brand with a high volume of site traffic, these delays created a poor user experience and limited conversions.

Unoptimized code and heavy plugins

Multiple third-party plugins and complex slideshow features were causing bottlenecks across the site. Despite being visually appealing, these scripts weighed down performance, making each page slower to load and less responsive.

Our approach

Migration to Shopify 2.0

We migrated Tuft & Paw’s store to Shopify’s Online Store 2.0, adding our own customizations. This gave the brand a cleaner code base and greater flexibility for ongoing optimization.

Streamlined code and assets

Our developers restructured the theme’s code to prioritize critical preloads, lazy-load assets, and optimize CSS and JavaScript files. We ensured that only essential scripts loaded at any given time and reused components to minimize redundancy.

Custom slideshow system

To address one of the biggest performance challenges, we replaced Tuft & Paw’s heavy third-party slideshows with a custom-built solution powered by native CSS and HTML. This drastically improved load times while allowing the team to maintain visual flexibility through the Shopify theme customizer.