Changelog

Sign Customiser now delivers your customiser’s configuration from a global edge network of over 300 locations, so shoppers get it from a server near them instead of waiting on a round trip across the world. In our real-world testing from Australia, the data that powers the customiser arrived in about 60 milliseconds instead of over a second — roughly 20x faster — and shoppers in every region see a similar jump because the copy they download is served from their nearest city.

Speed never comes at the cost of accuracy: the moment you save a change to your customiser — pricing, colours, sizes, fonts, anything — the edge copies are refreshed worldwide within seconds, so every shopper always sees your latest design and prices.

What’s Changed

• Customiser data served from the edgeThe configuration your customiser loads on every visit now comes from the shopper’s nearest edge location rather than a single origin server.
• Up to 20x faster in far-away regionsMeasured load times for customiser data dropped from over a second to around 60 milliseconds for shoppers on the other side of the world, with meaningful gains everywhere else too.
• Always fresh, everywhereSaving a change in your admin clears the old copies globally within seconds, so faster never means out of date.
• Snappier first impressionsShoppers reach a ready-to-design customiser sooner, which means less waiting on slow connections and mobile networks.

We’ve reworked how the Sign Customiser calculates pricing, checks designs and prepares preview images behind the scenes. The result is a noticeably smoother experience while your customers are designing — and a quicker path to checkout once they’re happy with their sign.

What’s Changed

• Smoother rapid editingWhen a customer quickly changes text, colours or sizes, pricing and on-screen validation now keep up without stalling, so the customiser feels more responsive.
• Faster Add to Cart readinessThe Add to Cart button becomes available sooner after a design is finished, reducing the wait before your customers can move through to checkout.
• More accurate previewsReview and preview images refresh from the latest version of the design, so what customers see always matches the sign they’re ordering.
• Less wasted workChanges that don’t affect the look of the sign no longer trigger unnecessary recalculations, keeping the whole experience quick.
• Better on every deviceThese improvements are especially noticeable on slower connections and mobile devices, which can help improve conversion rates for your store.

No action is needed on your end — these improvements apply automatically to every customiser.

Sign Customiser’s AI Sign Designer now features powerful image editing capabilities with significant performance improvements and enhanced functionality.

Key Enhancements

Transparency Support Fixed

Critical issues with generating images containing transparency have been resolved. Logos with transparent backgrounds are now handled correctly, maintaining their intended visual appearance across all sign materials including neon and acrylic.

Improved Shape Interpretation for Complex Images

Enhanced shape detection algorithms now provide superior interpretation of busy and complex images. The AI Sign Designer can better distinguish between overlapping elements, handle intricate patterns, and accurately identify shapes in visually dense designs. This improvement ensures that even the most detailed logos and graphics are converted with precision, maintaining the integrity of complex brand elements.

Customers who are using iframes to embed their customisers on their stores should now see significant speed improvements when loading their pages.

These initial load speeds should help with your overall Google Pagespeed performance scores, which attributes to the overall SEO of your customiser pages.

You can check your stores pagespeed score yourself by visiting https://pagespeed.web.dev/.

Over the past few months we have been re-engineering how products are created in our system. The aim of this project was to eliminate the case where a product would be generated with out any product images. However after many months of work we have also been able to significantly reduce the time it takes to create a product and add it to a users cart.

This has been a significant undertaking but we are now happy to report that we have reduced the time it takes to create a product and add to a users cart by about 45% on average.

The speed increase should be noticeable to all users and we hope that this will lead to an increase in conversion rates for our merchants.

Reduced the initial time it takes for the app to appear to the customers by 88%. This improvement aims to provide a better user experience for your customers by getting them to the app faster.

From an initial load time of around 5.1ms to 0.6ms as per our tests and calculations.

We have been able to decrease the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) score by 95% on average. This is a significant improvement from before and may provide a boost in SEO as search engines such as google factor in CLS as one of the performance metrics for page speed ranking. This improvement will also provide a better user experience for your customers while the app is loading.

Starting today, the time it takes for our app to become usable for the customer has been reduced by an average of 150 percent. This huge performance gain can be attributed to clever data caching and leveraging the best of Cloudflares technologies to ensure global network traffic is routed in the most efficient way possible.

Our app data is highly dynamic, and we needed to create a solution that would be reliable but also able to respond to changes to the data instantly, after months of testing different solutions, we are pretty proud of the work that went into this and really happy with the performance improvement.

The end result is customers are now able to use our app in a noticeably faster time which should translate to better sale conversions for your store.

The time taken for a new custom sign to be created on Shopify and added to a customers cart has improved by a factor of 50% - 70%, this variable is dependant on the overall sign sign and choices of background images and product options.

This update should help with an increase in CRO, especially on devices with a slow internet connection around the world.

Since launch, we have constantly been pushing new updates to the client-facing app; these updates extended functionality but came at the cost of increasing the initial app’s payload size and affecting run time performance. 

We have been optimising our code base for the past month and have reduced our app’s initial payload size by over 50%  with no loss of features. This means a significant improvement in the time it takes to load pages with our app installed. It also substantially reduces browsers’ time to parse and evaluate our code base, especially on lower-powered devices such as mobile phones. 

We also replaced our app rendering engine with a modern solution that increases performance; in our testing, we see 5x - 9x improvements for state changes and renders. 

A faster app correlates to more potential sales as it will run better on all devices, especially lower-powered devices and have better page speed, increasing SEO. But we are not done yet; over the next few months, we have several planned updates that will improve our app’s performance even more.