The photography is doing all the work. The build is not helping.

The heading typeface ships 2.95 MB — 64% of the page

shipporimincho_n4.woff2 transfers at 2,951 KB decoded. Total uncached page weight is 4.6 MB across 194 requests, so this one file is nearly two-thirds of everything the browser downloads.

Shippori Mincho is a Japanese Mincho carrying the full JIS kanji set. The store renders roughly 100 Latin glyphs. The other ~7,000 are paid for on every first visit.

Five @font-face rules declare it — four at weight 400, one at 700. None declares font-display, so the browser defaults to auto: a flash of invisible text while a 2.95 MB file downloads. On 4G that is several seconds of blank headings.

Every primary button fails WCAG AA at 1.84:1

White text on #B0C0DE measures 1.84:1. AA requires 4.5:1 at these sizes, so the buttons sit at 41% of the requirement.

The sale price is the worst of these. On a kitchen discounted from ₱31,800 to ₱19,100, the discounted figure renders in pale pink at 1.73:1 — the number most likely to close the sale is the least legible thing on the card.

The custom-work page has no inquiry form

/pages/custom-inquiries contains zero <form> elements and zero email inputs. The only conversion path is a mailto: link rendered as body text:

Email: lifeinadollhouse.shop@gmail.com

This is the store's highest-value offer. The homepage lists a one-of-a-kind dollhouse at ₱174,900, and "Kitchens | Custom" is a top-level collection. The page runs 5,720 px and 168 words to arrive at a Gmail address typed into a paragraph.

A mailto: link does nothing for anyone on webmail without a configured default client — which is most people on a phone. Nothing is captured, no response time is stated, and there is no button.

The mobile hero is a 168px unreadable strip with no alt text

The hero is one flattened PNG — New_Website_Main_Photo_collage_3_1296x.png, 1238 × 533 — showing three interiors side by side, inside a slideshow that holds a single slide. At 390px it renders 390 × 168 and the three interiors become illegible thumbnails. Its alt is empty.

The section contains exactly four characters of text: "SHOP". No headline, no statement of what the store sells, no reason to stay.

Above it the header measures 446 px on desktop — half a 900px viewport before any content — including a 38px empty announcement bar. On mobile a visitor scrolls roughly 370 px of chrome before the first product appears.

There is no email capture anywhere on the site

querySelectorAll('input[type=email]').length returns 0 on the homepage, About, Featured In and Custom Inquiries. No newsletter, no back-in-stock alert, no waitlist.

The homepage currently features a sold-out product — Scalloped Pendant Light Fixture, ₱1,600 — with no way to be told when it returns. For a maker-led store where stock is limited by hand production, every sold-out listing is a captured-demand signal being thrown away.

3,441 px of the homepage is a gallery with no text and no links

Section #shopify-section-1581385581139 measures 3,441 px tall on mobile with textLength: 0, links: 0, and nine images. Total mobile page height is 9,678 px — so this is 36% of the entire homepage: four phone screens of photography that cannot be clicked, captioned or bought from.

On desktop the same nine images sit in an uncontrolled grid. Measured left edges by row:

row 1   63px   328px   533px
row 2   62px   328px   604px
row 3   63px   306px   543px

Nothing aligns to anything, and widths differ within each row, so it reads as broken rather than as deliberate masonry.

The press wall is a single flat PNG

The "Featured In" block is one raster image — featured_in-01_360x.png, alt="Life In A Dollhouse Featured In graphic". Section stats: one image, zero characters of text, zero links.

It carries eight genuine trust signals — The Wall Street Journal, House Beautiful, Better Homes & Gardens, CNBC Make It, Apartment Therapy, Star Tribune, Localish, Vale Magazine — and not one is text, and not one links to the piece. They are invisible to search engines, invisible to screen readers, and unverifiable to a buyer deciding whether to send ₱174,900 to a small shop.

The logos are also optically unbalanced inside the raster: WSJ and Star Tribune dominate while Apartment Therapy nearly disappears.

The watermark sits on top of the product

A large opaque "LIFE IN A DOLLHOUSE" house badge covers roughly a quarter of every catalogue image, placed over the merchandise rather than beside it.

On the rug range this is actively destructive. /collections/all opens on nine near-identical Anne Miniature Dollhouse Rug colourways at ₱700 each — Blue, Chai, Charcoal, Light Gray, Natural, Vintage Rose and more. The pattern and colour are the product, and they are exactly what the badge covers. The same badge repeats through the product gallery and the related-products row, so four different rugs read as four copies of one image.

There is no type scale

Every visible character on the site is Shippori Mincho. Measured across the homepage:

The largest heading is 1.8× body; most are 1.4×. H1, H2 and H5 all render at the same 25.2 px. Nothing in the typography tells the eye what matters, which is why the page reads as one undifferentiated column.

Body line-height is 1.4 — tight for any text, and serif body copy wants more room than sans, not less.

Heading order is inverted and the H1 is wrong

Document order on the homepage:

H2   Hi, I'm Ella!
H1   Ella's Top Picks        ← the only H1 on the page
H2   Follow me on Instagram:
H5   Your Order

The single H1 on the store's most important page is a collection title. The brand statement above it is an H2, and the hero has no heading at all.

/collections/all — the main Shop destination, 249 products — has H1: "Products", no collection description, and the title "Products – Life In A Dollhouse".

Nine images carry filename or empty alt text

alt="IMG_7182.jpg"
alt="IMG_6968.JPG"
alt="IMG_1590.jpg"
alt="photo_feb_15_3_34_34_pm.JPG"
alt="IMG_6018.JPG"
alt="IMG_7561.JPG"
alt=""   × 3   (including the hero collage)

All twelve Instagram tiles share one identical string: alt="Instagram life.in.a.dollhouse".

For a store whose photography is its main sales argument, this discards the descriptive text most likely to bring in image-search traffic.

29 tap targets fall below 44 px on mobile

The hamburger matters most: it is the only route to navigation on mobile, at 30 px square against a 44 px guideline.

Add to cart does not read as the primary action

On the product page the button measures 148 × 30 px in pale periwinkle with a white label at 1.84:1. It sits beside the quantity box and is visually lighter than the Size dropdown directly above it. The dropdown looks more important than the purchase.

On mobile it is neither full-width nor sticky, so on a 3,433 px page it scrolls out of view within one swipe.

There is no stock indicator, no shipping estimate, no returns line and no production-time note near it — on a store where "READY TO SHIP" versus custom is the central distinction, and lead time is the buyer's main question.

An empty announcement bar renders on every page

<div class="notification header-announcement">

</div>

38 px tall, blush pink, containing only whitespace — present on the homepage, the product page and every collection. It reads as a broken component.

It matters more than a stray div normally would, because the Instagram feed in the footer is currently surfacing a "pre–black friday SALE — 20% off all ready to ship, 15% off all custom" post. Either a promotion is live and unannounced, or the feed is serving creative from last November. Both are worse than an empty bar.

Instagram tiles ship at 6× their display size

Twelve tiles render at 180 × 240 CSS px and are sourced at 1080 × 1440 — a 6× oversample, from a third-party host outside Shopify's image pipeline, so no responsive srcset applies. The first tile is loading="eager".

Separately, every content image on the homepage is loading="auto" — effectively eager. Twenty images are fetched before first paint, including the nine-image gallery three screens down.

The same app throws a preload warning on every template:

The resource https://bucket.useifsapp.com/posts/…/3886191424753203197.jpg
was preloaded using link preload but not used within a few seconds
from the window's load event.

Ragged product grid

Card images render at 165×141, 165×217, 165×165 and 165×155 — no fixed aspect ratio. Rows are uneven, Sale and Sold Out badges float at different heights, and prices never align across a row. Set one aspect ratio with object-fit: contain on a neutral ground.

Unbounded product titles

"READY TO SHIP! Dollhouse Kitchen with Miniature Refrigerator and Double Ovens - 1:12 scale by Life In A Dollhouse" runs seven lines on a mobile card. Nearly every title repeats - 1:12 Scale by Life In A Dollhouse on a single-brand store whose scale is already in the site title. Clamp to two lines; move the suffix into product metadata.

Shop opens sorted alphabetically

/collections/all (249 products) defaults to Alphabetically, A–Z, so the first two screens are nine near-identical Anne rugs. The first impression of the catalogue is repetition. Switch to Best Selling or a curated manual order.

Currency label disagrees with prices

The picker reads USD while every price renders as ₱700.00 PHP. Shopify is geolocating correctly; the selector label is not following. Confusing at best, a checkout-abandonment risk at worst.

No breadcrumb on the product page

[class*=breadcrumb] returns nothing. Navigation is a "Back to: Ella's Top Picks" link plus Previous / Next, which occupies the prime top-right position for very little value. A breadcrumb helps both wayfinding and search.

Product specs are run-on paragraphs

Colour, sizes and materials arrive as separate one-line paragraphs — "Color: Mist", "Available Sizes:", "Small- 5 x 8 inches", "Large- 8 x 10 inches". This is tabular data; make it a definition list. And add the full-scale equivalent — a 5 × 8 inch rug at 1:12 is a 5 × 8 foot rug in a real room — because that conversion is what this audience actually buys on.

jQuery 1.9.1 loaded from a third-party CDN

ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.9.1/jquery.min.js, 32 KB, released 2013. jQuery before 3.5.0 carries known XSS issues (CVE-2020-11022, CVE-2020-11023), and it loads render-blocking from a domain the store does not control. Worth raising with the theme developer.

Twitter bird share icon

Dated since the 2023 rebrand. A small signal, but it sits on every product page.

Console errors on every page load

Two errors on every load — a blocked shop.app frame (CSP frame-ancestors, Shopify-side and benign) and the resulting 403. Worth confirming with Shopify that Shop Pay's messaging component is actually functioning, since it is being blocked.