How to tell if your Shopify agency or developer is doing a good job

I'll be honest with you from the start: most Shopify store owners in LATAM don't know how to evaluate their agency or developer. And it's not their fault. No one taught them what to ask, what to demand, or what red flags to look for.

I've seen it in dozens of stores in LATAM: the client pays, waits, receives something that "looks nice," and assumes everything is fine. Until sales don't come in, the store loads slowly, or months later they discover that the SEO was misconfigured from day one.

This guide is to prevent that from happening to you. I'm going to give you the exact tools I use to audit Shopify projects, evaluate a technical team's work, and know—with data, not intuition—if they are doing their job well.

1. The metrics that truly matter for evaluating your Shopify developer

The first mistake store owners make is evaluating their agency's work by how the store looks. Design matters, of course. But there are much more objective metrics that tell you if the technical work is well done.

⚡ Loading Speed (Core Web Vitals)

Google measures user experience with three key indicators. Your agency should know them by heart and deliver a store that meets them:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): the largest content element on the page should load in less than 2.5 seconds.
• FID / INP (Interaction to Next Paint): the response to user interactions should be less than 200ms.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): elements should not move while the page loads. Ideal score: less than 0.1.

You can check this for free at Google PageSpeed Insights. Enter your URL and check the results for both mobile and desktop.

🔍 Technical SEO from day one

A well-built Shopify store should have the following configured from launch:

• Active XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console
• Robots.txt without accidental blocks to important pages
• Unique meta titles and meta descriptions on all key pages
• Clean URLs without unnecessary parameters
• Correctly implemented canonical tags
• Schema markup (structured data) for products

📱 Real mobile experience

In LATAM, over 70% of e-commerce traffic comes from mobile devices. Your store shouldn't just "look good" on mobile—it must convert on mobile. That means:

• Purchase buttons accessible without zooming
• Images optimized for small screens
• Smooth one-handed checkout
• Forms that don't require horizontal scrolling

🛒 Conversion rate as a quality indicator

A well-built Shopify store in a competitive niche should have a conversion rate between 1.5% and 3.5%. If you're driving quality traffic and your rate is below 1%, there's a technical or UX problem that your agency should have solved.

2. Red flags: signs that something is wrong with your project

I've seen it in dozens of projects in LATAM: there are very clear signs that an agency or developer is not doing their job well. Here are the most common ones:

• They don't have a clear onboarding process or ask for a detailed brief at the beginning
• They don't use a staging environment or duplicated theme for testing before publishing
• They make changes directly to the live production theme
• They don't document the changes they make in your store
• They don't give you access to your own store or limit it without reason
• They install apps without explaining the impact on speed or costs
• They don't provide a closing report of what was done
• They disappear after delivering the project without post-launch support
• They don't know Core Web Vitals or the impact of technical SEO
• They charge you for "maintenance" but you can't see what they did

🔴 The most common excuses (and what they really mean)

3. How to perform a basic audit of your Shopify store yourself

You don't need to be a developer to do a basic review of your store. Here's the exact process I follow when auditing a new store:

1. PageSpeed Insights: Go to pagespeed.web.dev, enter your URL, and check the mobile score. Less than 50 is critical. Between 50-89 is improvable. 90+ is excellent.
2. Google Search Console: Verify that your sitemap is submitted and there are no coverage errors. If your agency didn't set this up, it's a serious problem.
3. Review of installed apps: In your Shopify admin, go to Apps and count how many you have active. More than 15 active apps without justification is a sign of poor architecture.
4. Checkout test: Make a complete test purchase on mobile. Measure how many steps it takes and if the process is smooth.
5. Meta tag review: Use the SEO Meta in 1 Click Chrome extension and verify that each page has unique titles and descriptions.
6. Broken links test: Use Dead Link Checker to find broken links in your store.
7. Image review: Verify that product images are in WebP format or compressed. Images larger than 500KB are a speed issue.

4. The exact questions you should ask your agency

These are the questions I would ask before hiring and during the project. They are not to intimidate—they are to filter real professionals from those who only know how to sell.

Before hiring:

• Can you show me 3 Shopify stores you've launched in the last 12 months?
• What is your process for testing before publishing changes?
• How do you handle technical SEO at launch?
• What PageSpeed score do you guarantee on mobile?
• What does post-launch support include and for how long?
• Who will have access to my store and with what permissions?

During the project:

• Can I see the staging environment before publishing?
• Do you have an updated scope document?
• How do you notify me when you make changes in production?
• What apps are you installing and why?

At project close:

• Can you provide me with a report of everything that was configured?
• Are there any accesses or credentials I should change for security?
• What maintenance tasks should I do monthly?

5. Agency vs. Freelancer vs. In-house Developer: which is best?

This is one of the questions I get asked the most. And the honest answer is: it depends on your business stage, your budget, and the complexity of your project.

✅ Checklist for evaluating any Shopify provider

• Has a verifiable portfolio with active stores
• Understands Core Web Vitals and can explain them
• Uses staging environments for testing
• Documents all changes
• Gives you full access to your store from the start
• Has a clear onboarding and project closing process
• Can show you measurable results from previous projects
• Knows Shopify policies and updates

Frequently Asked Questions