What we run into on real stores, written down so you can act on it yourself.
The paid edition is sold on capability, and merchants often hear it as speed. Those are different things and the distinction is worth money.
We sell this work, so read the following knowing that. It is still the comparison we give people who ask, including the parts that argue against us.
Every old store reaches the point where the next upgrade costs more than it saves. Knowing where that point is prevents an expensive mistake in both directions.
These get discussed as alternatives and they are not. They solve different problems, and knowing which problem you have decides where the money goes.
Filters are where a large catalogue stops being an asset and starts being a performance problem. Usually for one of four reasons.
Every second on a category page costs you a browser. Every second in checkout costs you a buyer who had already decided.
The store was fine on Friday and slow on Monday, and the only thing that happened in between was an update. That narrows it down more than you might think.
Multiple storefronts on one installation share more than most people realise, and that sharing is where the performance goes.
An import that runs overnight is an inconvenience. An import that fails halfway leaves your catalogue in a state nobody can explain.
The product page is where someone decides to buy. It is also the page most likely to carry a photo gallery nobody optimised.
Visitors who use search convert better than visitors who browse. Which makes it the worst place on the store to be slow, and the most common place to be wrong.
Your customers are fine and your team is losing an hour a day. That combination points somewhere specific, and it is rarely where people look first.
Before you blame the platform or book a rebuild, check these four. In most stores we are asked to look at, the answer is sitting in one of them.