Turbify Theme Tune-Up

For a few years now, a relatively easy and cost-effective way to give any Turbify store a facelift has been to choose one of the pre-built designs using the Theme Manager option in a Turbify store. Turbify offers three themes to choose from, which can be applied to any existing store running editor V3.0 using the "Theme Manager" option inside the store manager:

• Fanal
• DiVitto
• Sambee

(A couple of important notes here: 1) We do not recommend that you apply a theme directly to your store by yourself because applying a theme removes all custom templates your store might have, and 2) Theme Manager is currently offline as part of the Yahoo-Turbify migration.)

Some of you might already be using these themes in your stores, with or without customizations. If that's the case, this information is for you.

The pre-built Turbify themes are modern in design, responsive (so they work on mobile devices), and feature-rich. However, these themes were built in 2016, a fact that, by today's standards, makes the underlying coding of these themes somewhat dated. There have been many improvements since 2016 in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, rendering some of the groundbreaking technical approaches used in the development of these themes obsolete.

There have also been numerous changes in Google's ranking algorithm, particularly the 2020 introduction of Core Web Vitals (https://www.ytimes.com/google-core-web-vitals-yahoo-store.html), metrics that Google has been using as SEO signals, as well as Google's shift to Mobile First indexing, also in 2020.

To give your theme-based store a quick and affordable tune-up and bring the underlying code up to par with today's technology, we offer the following quick fixes:

Lazyload Update

All three themes employ "lazy loading" of images, which means that the images are only downloaded to the page when they become visible (for example, when scrolling down on the page). At the time these themes were built, Lazy Loading could only be done via JavaScript, but today all major browsers have built-in lazy load support. We can remove the old, outdated JavaScript-based lazy load and replace it with fast, native, browser-based lazy loading.

Section Layout Fix

At the time these themes were built, browser support for grid layouts was limited. For this reason, the grids you see on section pages of these themes were designed using now obsolete CSS technology, coupled with JavaScript functions to dynamically calculate grid cell sizes to make the grids appear uniform. Today, grid layouts are commonplace, and we can upgrade your templates to this new technology. The JavaScript method is both slow (especially on larger section pages) and can cause layout shifts at page generation, which can negatively affect your Google Core Web Vitals score.

Product Info / Image Layout Fix

Similar to the section layout, the product page's image/info/buy box area has also been set up using an outdated CSS/JavaScript method. We can update this code to use an up-to-date HTML/CSS-based layout, giving you a better Core Web Vitals score.

Image Viewer Upgrade

The image viewer used for the product images is outdated, and its code is no longer supported or updated. We can upgrade this viewer to the current standard version, which is faster, nicer, and more lightweight.

Slider Upgrade

The product sliders and image sliders used in the theme can be updated to reduce the layout shift that occurs while these sliders are being generated. The upgraded code can improve your Google Core Web Vitals score.