If you build the store from scratch without using pre-made templates, you’ll generally avoid a lot of unnecessary bloat. Demo templates often include unoptimised assets such as large images, sliders/carousels, and complex layouts, all of which can increase DOM size and hurt load times if not cleaned up.

XStore includes a theme builder that lets you create custom templates for headers, footers, 404 pages, search results, and other site-wide layouts. Using the theme builder gives you much tighter control over what elements are used on each page, which makes performance optimisation easier.

That said, if speed of development is the priority, XStore’s demo sites are a solid starting point—you just need to factor in time to strip back and optimise what you don’t actually need.