Apps accumulate quietly
Each one is installed to solve a specific problem, seems reasonable at the time, and is never reviewed. Two years later the store has eighteen apps, a substantial monthly bill and a homepage carrying scripts from twelve different services.
We audited a store paying £340 a month in apps. Four of them did overlapping jobs, three had not been used in a year, and removing them took two seconds off the homepage load.
Three costs, not one
- The subscription, which is the visible cost and usually the smallest
- Page weight — scripts and styles loading on every page, often on pages the app does not affect
- Leftover theme code, because uninstalling an app frequently leaves its snippets behind
That third one is the reason a store that has had twenty apps over three years is slower than one that has had four, even after the uninstalls.
Auditing what you have
- List every app, its monthly cost, and what it is actually for
- Identify overlaps — review apps, popup apps and upsell apps commonly duplicate
- Check the last time anyone used each one's dashboard
- Look for apps whose function your theme now handles natively
- Check your theme for leftover code from apps you removed
That exercise takes an afternoon and it typically removes a third of the apps and a meaningful share of the bill.
Which are usually worth keeping
| Purpose | Worth an app? |
|---|---|
| Reviews | Yes — hard to do well otherwise |
| Email marketing | Yes |
| Accounting sync | Yes, if you have volume |
| Shipping rules beyond the basics | Usually |
| Popups and banners | One at most, if any |
| Page building | Rarely — costs speed |
| Anything the theme can do | No |
Check what they load
Before installing, look at what the app adds to your pages. A well-built app loads only where it is needed; a poorly-built one adds scripts to every page including checkout-adjacent ones.
Reviews and install counts tell you about popularity. Opening the network tab on a demo store tells you about cost.