In February 2018, Ticketmaster ran into a security issue involving a customer support chatbot on its UK website. The chatbot, provided by Inbenta Technologies, was on the payment page where customers entered their card details. Almost 9.4 million customers across Europe may have been affected, and Ticketmaster was later fined £1.25 million.
Most of the time, you install an app because you need it for something. Maybe you want to show customer reviews or give shoppers a way to check their size. You find one that works and carry on with your day. You probably aren’t thinking about the code it adds to your site or when it was last updated.
Then you add another app, and another. After a while, you might have two doing pretty much the same thing. Others may be slowing down your site, and some might still be running even though you stopped using them ages ago.
There’s more to the cost than the monthly fees. Too many apps can affect how quickly your site loads and create security risks. Even when you uninstall one, some of its code may be left behind. Extra code can affect your site’s speed and security, and removing an app doesn’t always get rid of everything it leaves behind. This article looks at the hidden costs of using too many apps, with practical advice on how to manage them and what to check before installing another one.
Every App Ships Code To Your Shoppers’ Phones
Most storefront apps work by dropping JavaScript onto your pages. That code doesn’t run on the app developer’s servers. It runs on your customer’s phone, fighting for the same bandwidth and processing power as your product photos and your add-to-cart button. While a lightweight sizing widget has a minimal footprint, heavy tracking pixels, marketing tags, and customer support chat widgets often demand significantly more processing power.
Google’s web.dev team doesn’t sugarcoat this. Adding an app to your store often means adding more code that someone else controls. You may not notice a problem at first, but those scripts can affect page speed, security, and how customer information is handled. There’s also the issue of apps loading the same libraries separately. When that happens, your store ends up downloading code it may already have, simply because each app brings its own dependencies. So if two of your apps rely on the same library, your shoppers may end up downloading it twice.
And almost every site is dealing with this. HTTP Archive’s 2024 Web Almanac found that 92% of pages load at least one third party, and plenty of those get pulled in indirectly by other third parties. In other words, when you install one app, you may also be installing whatever that app decides to bring along.
Google’s advice here is about as simple as it gets, and most stores still skip it: audit your third-party scripts regularly and get rid of the ones you don’t need.
App Store Performance Rules Grade Each App Alone
To be fair, the platforms do try to keep individual apps in check. Shopify won’t list an app in its App Store if it drags storefront Lighthouse performance scores down by more than 10 points. For one app, that’s a reasonable line to draw.
The catch is that the rule looks at one app at a time. It says nothing about what happens when six apps, each of which passed on its own, all load on the same product page. Your shoppers never see your apps one at a time. Customers aren’t going to stick around trying to figure out why your site is slow. They might wait a few seconds, then leave and buy somewhere else.
Shopify’s developer docs make the connection between site speed, sales, repeat purchases, and search rankings. It’s something store owners need to think about too. An app might be useful, but if it slows down the shopping experience, you have to ask whether it’s worth keeping.
Uninstalling An App Doesn’t Always Remove It
Hitting uninstall feels like a clean break. A lot of the time, it isn’t. Algolia’s uninstall checklist for its BigCommerce integration is a good, honest look at what can get left behind. It walks merchants through deleting the search page, the scripts in BigCommerce’s Script Manager, the widgets placed through Page Builder, and the widget templates. It also warns that uninstalling before switching off one feature can leave unused metafields sitting in your store, and that if the automatic cleanup wasn’t followed, all those pages, scripts, and widgets have to come out by hand.
And that’s a well-documented app from a big vendor that bothered to write cleanup instructions at all. Plenty of apps don’t. You might cancel an app after its free trial and never think about it again, but some of its code could still be running on your store. After uninstalling an app, check Script Manager and your theme files to see if anything was left behind. Check your theme’s code files (specifically theme.liquid or layout files) or use your browser’s developer tools to inspect network requests and confirm no orphaned scripts are still trying to load. Don’t assume uninstalling the app removes every script it added.
Your Product Data Can End Up Living Inside Someone Else’s App
Before adding another app, check what happens to the information you put into it if you decide to remove it later. You could have dozens of product details stored there, from size charts to care instructions. Losing access to those would mean a lot of extra work.
BigCommerce metafields have different access settings, and one of them is app_only. If a field uses that setting, only the app that created it can access the information. So don’t assume you can move everything over easily if you switch to another app. Check first, while you still have a choice. That makes sense from a security standpoint, but it also means content written by one app might be invisible to another app, to your theme, or to the next developer you bring in.
Now multiply that across five or six content apps. A single product’s details end up scattered across several places with several owners. Bulk edits get harder, migrations get messier, and canceling one subscription can cut you off from content you thought belonged to you.
That’s why experienced teams tend to go the other direction, keeping structured product content in the platform’s own data model and managing it from one spot. On BigCommerce, Advanced Metafields is built for exactly that. It turns the platform’s native metafields into a simple content management layer, with custom field types, validation, and CSV import and export across products, variants, categories, brands, and orders. One tool working with native fields can take the place of a separate app for every kind of content.
Anything That Loads Near Checkout Is A Security Decision
Let’s go back to Ticketmaster for a second, because the regulator’s findings read like a warning for any store with a busy checkout page. The ICO said Ticketmaster should have risk-assessed the third-party scripts it added to its site, and pointed out that attacks targeting less secure suppliers were a well-known risk long before the breach. It also found that nine weeks went by between Ticketmaster first hearing about possible fraud and actually monitoring network traffic on its payment page.
Payment card rules have caught up since then. According to the PCI Security Standards Council, e-skimming attacks have become more common as stores rely more on outside scripts. To deal with that, PCI DSS v4.x now includes Requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1, which call for payment page scripts to be authorized, checked for integrity, and monitored for tampering.
So every app script running on your payment page is one more thing you have to approve and keep an eye on. Fewer scripts means less to track, and less for an attacker to go after. Securing your checkout isn’t just about a one-time compliance check; it requires regular oversight of every third-party script given access to your store.
Questions Worth Asking Before The Next Install
Before you install anything new, find out what it actually loads on your storefront and on which pages. If an app is only used on product pages, why is it loading on checkout too? That’s the kind of thing worth checking before you install it. Find out where the app keeps your data, whether you can get it back if you leave, and what actually gets removed when you uninstall it. Don’t just take for granted that uninstalling means everything is gone.
Also, before paying for another app, have a look at what your store can already do. You might find the feature is built in, or that another app you’re paying for already covers it. No point paying twice for the same thing.
And don’t let your app list grow unchecked. Every few months, go through it and see what’s still being used. If nobody can explain why an app is there, it’s probably time to take a closer look. Apps added for a holiday sale, a test that wrapped up, or a feature nobody ever turned on are good candidates to cut.
Browse our list of ecommerce store apps to find a team that understands the hidden cost of too many ecommerce apps. And if your BigCommerce store is juggling separate apps just to hold product content, Advanced Metafields is a practical place to start trimming things down.
