How I Cut a Hydrogen Homepage From 5s to 2s By Emre Mutlu, creator of the world's first English Shopify Hydrogen course on Udemy. April 21, 2026. Published: April 21, 2026 Last updated: April 21, 2026 Reading time: 6 min Article summary I cut a Shopify Plus Hydrogen homepage from roughly 4 to 5 seconds to about 2 seconds by stopping the initial useEffect fetch, server-rendering only the first tab of each section, and lazy-loading the rest on interaction. The bigger win was not speed alone. It was getting product HTML back into the first response. I cut a production Shopify Plus Hydrogen homepage from roughly 4 to 5 seconds to about 2 seconds by removing one bad assumption: that every tab on the page needed its product data on first load. It did not. Once I moved the first tab into the route loader and lazy-loaded the rest, both speed and SEO got cleaner. Why the homepage was slow in the first place The slowdown came from loading too much data too late.…