I’m having a weird issue with my Shopify store where images sometimes appear corrupted or broken when the page first loads. The images look all distorted and pixelated, kind of like they’re not loading properly. This doesn’t happen every time someone visits the page, just occasionally. I’m thinking it might be related to lazy loading functionality that delays image loading until needed. Has anyone else run into this kind of image corruption problem on their Shopify site? I’m not sure if it’s a theme issue, a loading speed problem, or something else entirely. Any suggestions on how to fix this would be really helpful.
check your theme’s image transform settings in the liquid code. I had the same pixelated mess - turned out my theme was resizing images while they were still loading. add ?v=timestamp to your image urls to force fresh loads and see if that fixes the corruption.
Had the same issue about six months back - turned out to be CDN caching mixed with slow connections. Shopify’s image optimization was serving progressive JPEGs, but browsers were trying to render them before they finished downloading. Fixed it by adding preload tags for above-the-fold images in my theme’s liquid files and switching product images to webp with fallbacks. Also check your image sizes - anything over 1MB gave me loading problems. That corruption you’re seeing? Browser’s trying to display half-loaded image data. Test on different devices and network speeds to confirm that’s what’s happening.
It seems you may be facing a loading sequence issue that could be linked to improper handling of images. I encountered a similar problem previously, where my Shopify store would occasionally display distorted images. The issue stemmed from conflicting image optimization settings and the lazy loading implemented in my custom theme. I resolved this by temporarily disabling the lazy loading in the theme to see if that isolated the issue. Monitoring network activity in the browser’s developer tools helped identify failed requests, confirming that the problem was related to timing, rather than corrupted image files themselves.