3 ms·

Reminds of a developer I hired through Fiverr that claimed he could achieve 99/100 Google pagespeed score for any Shopify website (and improve overall load time

Reminds of a developer I hired through Fiverr that claimed he could achieve 99/100 Google pagespeed score for any Shopify website (and improve overall load times of Shopify). He implemented his changes, and sure enough it scored 99/100. However, the site still seemed to be running slowly when I tested it. I dug into what code he had actually changed, and there were only a few lines of JavaScript injected into the site. The JS was obfuscated, after de-obfuscating it I realized all his code did was prevent any other JavaScript from being loaded if it detected the user-agent was coming from Google pagespeed :) After some back and forth with Fiverr I was able to get refunded, but I'm sure the thousands of other customers that gave him 5 star reviews have no idea.

22c 4y ago
If the service was advertised as "improve your page load times" then I can see how that's misleading, but if it was to get a 99/100 page speed score as a kind of "dumb" SEO hack then maybe you got what you paid for?
- cloudking 4y ago
  It was a service advertised to improve your Shopify load times with a number of "optimizations" not just pagespeed score. Updated the original comment to clarify.
  - klysm 4y ago
    The load time is certainly way better with all the js disabled
dymk 4y ago
To be fair, the value in getting a 99/100 pagespeed is SEO optimization, so sites rank higher on Google. The point is getting more traffic to the site, not a better user experience.
- antifa 4y ago
  But doesn't Google penalize you for user agent based cheating?
  - wstuartcl 4y ago
    Yes. Serving content crafted for spiders specifically is a blacklist waiting to happen.
Aleksdev 4y ago
Good thing you were able to get that refunded.
taoufix 4y ago
Ah! The good old VW diesel dupe solution.