Render Better is always pushing the envelope on technological innovation to bring our customers the most advanced technology in web performance optimization. Our latest version of Render Better (known as 2.0, the old version is now called Legacy) frees us from a big limitation of the past version: Render Better no longer modifies Shopify theme code directly, and instead sits between traffic and Shopify’s servers, optimizing the response on-the-fly.
Here’s how it worked previously and how it works now:
How Legacy worked previously
- Install Render Better theme code
- Render Better crawled your website and learned the optimal way to load it
- Render Better injected optimizations into the theme
- Shopify served an optimized theme
- Visitors saw a faster-loading website and keeps shopping
How 2.0 works now
- Point your domain at Render Better
- Render Better crawls your website and learns the optimal way to load it
- For each visitor, Render Better fetches your website from Shopify and optimizes it automatically
- The visitor sees an even faster-loading website and keeps shopping
Why this is an improvement
The legacy version of Render Better was constrained by Shopify and required changing theme code directly. This caused two major problems:
- Render Better couldn’t alter everything in the code, since it would create maintenance and code conflict problems for developers
- Render Better couldn’t alter the full server response from Shopify, only partially
Render Better 2.0 sits between visitors and Shopify’s servers so we can alter Shopify’s server response directly before it’s served back to visitors. This means Render Better no longer has to modify theme code anymore and can do a lot more with the responses it serves back.
What’s needed to install Render Better 2.0
This new version of Render Better opens the door for a whole new universe of optimizations we couldn’t do previously and requires even less effort to install! It simply requires pointing your website’s domain at Render Better.
There are some important considerations you should make before installing Render Better 2.0 though. Please read over our Render Better Onboarding Guide to learn about what you and your team should think about while migrating to Render Better 2.0