Future-Ready Performance: Why The Sak Still Counts on Yottaa Post-Shopify 2.0

About The Sak Brand Group

The Sak Brand Group is a heritage fashion company known for its handcrafted handbags, accessories, and footwear. With deep roots in California style and a growing DTC presence, the brand relies on Shopify to power its online storefront and reach digital shoppers with immersive product experiences. 

Jordan Katz, VP of eCommerce at The Sak, says the DTC channel is now a critical driver of growth and brand engagement. “Over the past few years, we’ve invested heavily in optimizing our online experience to convert visitors into customers, build loyalty, and grow lifetime value,” Katz explained. “It now represents a significant portion of our overall revenue and is central to our long-term business strategy.” 

A Complete “Platform Rejuvenation”

For Katz, delivering a fast, seamless online experience isn’t just a best practice — it’s a mandate. Laser-focused on tuning The Sak’s Shopify storefront to maintain frictionless shopper journeys, Katz led a major site redesign at the beginning of 2025. 

After five years on a legacy Shopify 1.0 theme, the team migrated to the faster, more flexible Shopify 2.0 framework. But this wasn’t a simple lift-and-shift, and one thing didn’t change: their reliance on Yottaa. “We didn’t just take all the old tags and layouts and move them to the new site,” Katz said. “We built it from the ground up.” 

The Sak used the migration as a full reset: auditing every third-party script, removing over 100 unnecessary apps, and hand-selecting only the technologies worth keeping. Katz suspected there were a few worth removing, but was surprised by how many unused or unnecessary tools were still running in the background. Yottaa’s Audit Third-Party Tags capability provided a complete inventory of every technology on the site and its impact on performance, enabling the team to make fast, data-driven decisions on what to keep, reconfigure, or cut. 

“Without Yottaa, the process would have been manual, time-consuming, and far less accurate. I was blown away by how many third parties we had — some I’d never even heard of,” Katz said.  

For the migration, The Sak took a measured approach: adding third-party tools back gradually to ensure they only kept what was truly needed. Yottaa’s Application Sequencing helped optimize the third-party load order from day one, so critical content appeared first and less essential scripts waited until after shoppers were engaged — all without developers needing to manually reconfigure settings for each app. “There’s no other tool where you can say, ‘Only load this review widget after a customer scrolls,’” Katz said. “It’s not just speed — it’s control.” 

Despite the full site cleanup, Yottaa’s optimization remained strong, delivering an immediate 29.5% speed improvement over the baseline 2.0 theme. And as the site stabilized post-launch, the impact grew even stronger — averaging 33.1% in the months since. “I would’ve thought the percentage impact would be diminished. But it stayed consistent, which proves how much value Yottaa still provides, especially on the remaining apps.” 

From Quick Fix to Long-Term Partnership

The Sak first brought Yottaa onboard in 2022 to speed up a sluggish 1.0 implementation, where out-of-the-box Shopify performance couldn’t keep up with shopper expectations. What started as a fix for slow load times quickly became a strategic part of their tech stack. Yottaa even helped The Sak avoid a costly, complex move to headless. 

“We wanted more flexibility and faster site speeds, but headless would have been expensive, resource-intensive, and risky,” Katz said. “Yottaa gave us the performance boost and control we were after without having to rebuild our architecture.” 

Even years in, Yottaa’s optimization suite delivers measurable results. “Milliseconds make millions. Our 33.1% speed boost isn’t abstract. It’s real dollars when you’re looking at conversion impact.” 

Staying Fast After Launch

Even with Shopify 2.0’s infrastructural improvements, Katz knew performance gains wouldn’t happen automatically. “Performance isn’t just about the platform — it’s about what runs on it,” he said. That’s why The Sak continued to rely on Yottaa to manage third-party impact, improve Core Web Vitals, and keep load times tight. 

Post-launch, Yottaa’s Real User Monitoring and Core Web Vitals Diagnostics helped pinpoint and resolve issues that could have chipped away at the site’s gains if they weren’t addressed quickly. For example, Yottaa detected an image-loading issue on high-traffic collection pages that was keeping LCP just outside Google’s “Good” range and even hurting search scores. “Yottaa gave us the exact image elements we needed to target,” Katz said. “We adjusted the loading method and saw immediate improvements in site speed and LCP score.” 

The SEO benefits were tangible, too. “We’ve already seen organic rankings pick up since the migration,” Katz added. “It’s still early, but Core Web Vitals improvements have definitely helped with domain authority and SEO scores.” 

When transitioning to a new theme, unexpected slowdowns from outdated scripts or changes in how apps interact can cause headaches. Yottaa’s Third-Party Violations and JavaScript Errors diagnostics catch these issues early, surfacing whether a slowdown is just a temporary glitch or a deeper third-party problem.  

“With Yottaa, we can tell right away if it’s a third-party causing [the problem],” Katz said. This early visibility allows The Sak to act fast, fixing misbehaving scripts or addressing sudden spikes in load times before they hurt shopper experience, conversion rates, or performance benchmarks. 

Validating Performance Gains on 2.0

Post-migration, Yottaa helped validate and further optimize the new site’s performance*: 

• Page load times dropped by over 1 second 
• Mobile speeds improved by ~20% 
• LCP dropped from 8.85s to 2.71s (64% improvement) 
• Optimization impact reached 29.5% immediately after launch, and has since averaged 33.1% as the site migration stabilized 

“Our conversion rate has been up across all major channels since launching the new site,” Katz said. “Even with more organic traffic from marketplace shoppers who may buy elsewhere, the speed gains have helped boost performance where it counts, in the channels we directly control.” 

CSM Partnership That Drives Action

The Sak also credits Yottaa’s ongoing partnership for helping the team continually improve site performance. “Yottaa doesn’t just provide the tools — they provide the guidance and expertise,” Katz said. “They walk through the site, identify anomalies, and suggest best practices — things I wouldn’t catch on my own.” 

This proactive engagement helps The Sak move quickly without overburdening their development team, surfacing issues like a breadcrumb URL structure hurting crawl efficiency or unexpected performance anomalies. For example, Yottaa flagged early morning spikes in Chrome browser load times — data Katz was able to bring back to Shopify for further investigation — and pinpointed an increase in JavaScript errors on key pages, complete with the exact day, time, and top error messages. Each fix has led to measurable performance improvements. 

Looking Ahead

With the migration complete, The Sak is focused on launching new integrations like Purple Dot for preorder management and Intelligems for A/B testing. Yottaa is ensuring performance isn’t sacrificed and has already configured sequencing rules to load these tools safely. 

“Looking ahead, we’re focused on scaling DTC growth by combining innovation with what makes The Sak unique: craftsmanship, sustainability, and storytelling,” Katz said. “As we expand with new integrations like preorder management and advanced testing, Yottaa ensures we can keep moving fast while delivering a frictionless, branded experience.” 

*Results originated from the Shopify 2.0 theme change. Yottaa’s monitoring confirmed the improvements and enabled further optimization.