The store feels laggy when clicking or scrolling

What causes a high INP or a laggy feel on a Volume store, and which theme settings to check first.

Clicking and scrolling are two different problems. A slow response to a tap is usually Interaction to Next Paint — JavaScript occupying the main thread while the visitor is trying to interact. Jerky scrolling is usually an effect that recalculates on every scroll frame.

Check what is running

Open Chrome DevTools → Performance, record while you tap or scroll the thing that feels slow, and look at which scripts hold the main thread. On most stores the long tasks belong to apps rather than to the theme.

Chat widgets, review carousels, popup builders and analytics tags are the usual offenders, and many of them initialise on the first interaction — exactly when INP is measured.

The scroll effects

If scrolling is what feels heavy, start with Theme settings → Animations and performance → Banner background animation. Animation offers Static (the theme default), parallax, sticky and two zoom modes; parallax and zoom both recalculate while the page moves. Each banner and media section can inherit this, turn it off, or override it — so a single section can be the cause even when the theme setting says Static.

Enable reveal animation, just above, animates sections into view as you scroll. It is off in the theme defaults.

The interaction effects

These also live in Theme settings → Animations and performance, and all of them are off or minimal in the theme defaults — a preset or a previous customization may have turned them on:

Animation speed

Drawers and popups — Disable (default), Basic or Smooth. Enable scale animation. Slider transition duration, 100–2000ms, default 300ms.

Cursor

Enable custom cursor — off by default. When on, it follows pointer movement continuously, which is the most expensive thing in this list. Cursor color (Solid color or Blend) and Hide default cursor appear underneath.

Buttons, arrows and navigation

Buttons and arrows each have Animation (Default, Fill, Rolling, Cascade) and Scale on hover. Navigation adds Links animation, Icons animation (Default, Rolling, Magnetic), Burger animation, Scale social media icons on hover and Animate 'Close' and 'Plus' icons on hover.

On a clean store none of these are expensive. On a store already running a dozen apps, they are the cheapest things to remove — turn them off one at a time and re-measure.

On mobile specifically

Phones have far less CPU headroom, so interaction delays show up there first. Test on a real mid-range Android device, not only on your own phone and not only in the simulator.

Preload links on hover (on by default) makes Volume start fetching a page as soon as the cursor touches a link. That is network traffic, not main-thread work, and it is not what causes lag — look at app scripts before switching it off.

If turning the animations off helps but you want them back, get in touch. Usually one app is responsible and can be configured to load later.