Shopify apps: how to think about your stack
The app store is designed to make adding apps feel low-risk. It isn't. Here's how I advise brands to approach it.
When brands first get onto Shopify, the app store feels like a solution to everything. Reviews? There's an app. Subscriptions? There's an app. Upsells, loyalty programmes, bundles, wishlists, size guides, back-in-stock alerts – there's an app for all of it, most of them free to try, all of them promising to increase revenue or save time.
And some of them genuinely do. But app bloat is one of the most consistent problems I see when I audit a Shopify store. Brands accumulate apps gradually, each one installed for a good reason, and end up with a store that's slow, fragile, expensive to run, and harder to maintain than it needs to be.
Why too many apps causes real problems
Every app you install adds code to your store. Some apps are disciplined about this – they load only what they need, only where they need it. Others inject scripts across every page regardless of relevance. The cumulative effect is a slower store, and speed directly affects conversion. A one-second delay in page load time reduces conversions by around 7%. That's not a marginal number at meaningful revenue levels.
Beyond speed, apps don't always work well together. A discount app, a pop-up app, and a reviews widget can conflict in ways that are hard to diagnose – buttons disappear, page layouts break, checkout behaves unexpectedly. The more apps you have, the more surface area for these conflicts.
There's also a maintenance cost. Every app needs updates. Most of the time that's routine, but updates can break things, and when they do it's usually at the worst possible moment. Keeping a lean app stack means fewer things that can go wrong.
And cost adds up. Many apps are free until you need the features that actually matter, then they're £20, £50, £100 a month – often tiered to your sales volume so the bill grows as your store does. It's worth auditing your app costs against actual usage at least once a year.
The apps I'd recommend considering
After years of building and advising on Shopify stores, here are the ones I find genuinely useful and reliably built:
Reviews.io for collecting and displaying customer reviews. Clean integration, automated email requests, and good display options on product pages. Social proof is non-negotiable.
Klaviyo for email marketing. Best-in-class for Shopify integration, segmentation, and automation. If you're on Mailchimp because you've always been on Mailchimp, it's worth reviewing whether Klaviyo makes more sense for you now.
Recharge for subscriptions and recurring payments. Robust, well-supported, and handles the complexity of subscription models without requiring custom development.
Rebuy for upsells and cross-sells. Increases average order value by surfacing relevant products at the right moments. Well-designed and doesn't feel intrusive when set up properly.
Boost Commerce for collection filtering and search. Shopify's native filtering is limited; Boost gives customers much more control over how they navigate large catalogues.
Matrixify for bulk data management. Essential for stores with large or complex product catalogues. Saves significant time on imports, exports, and data migrations.
Judge.me as an alternative to Reviews.io, particularly good value at smaller volumes.
This isn't an exhaustive list and it's not a prescription – every store is different and context matters. But these are all tools I've seen perform consistently well.
How to audit what you've got
If you've never done a proper app audit, it's worth doing. Go through every installed app and ask: is this actively being used? Is it generating measurable value? Does it overlap with anything else? What would happen if I removed it?
Anything that hasn't been used in three months should probably go. Anything that overlaps with another app – pick one.
And when you uninstall, check that the app hasn't left code behind in your theme files; many do, and that orphaned code continues to affect performance even after the app is gone.
The goal isn't minimal apps for its own sake – it's a lean, intentional stack where every tool earns its place.
When apps aren't the answer
Sometimes the right solution isn't an app at all. Functionality that's central to how your store works; subscription logic, custom product configurators, complex bundle pricing is often better built as custom code than held together by a third-party app you're dependent on and can't control.
A good agency will tell you when that's the case rather than defaulting to the app store.
If yours hasn't raised this conversation, it's worth asking.
