Whoosh vs Avada SEO: which one does your product page need?

You went looking for a speed app and found Avada

You sell a speckled ceramic mug, it’s your best seller, and its product page feels slow on your phone. So you searched the Shopify App Store for a speed app, and near the top was Avada AI SEO Image Optimizer, from the developer Avada SEO Suite. Its plans list a speed booster, so it looks like the answer.

It’s an SEO app first, though, which means its job is getting the mug found in Google, and most of what it does happens before anyone taps your link. Whoosh works on what the shopper sees after the tap. We make Whoosh, so keep that in mind when you read the table.

Here’s the easiest way to hold the two apart. Someone searches for a speckled mug on their phone and reads the sentence under your blue link. They tap, the mug page opens, and either the mug photo shows up first or your email popup does. Avada works on the first moment, and Whoosh works on the second.

What each app does to the mug

Let’s start with Avada, because it does a lot, and nearly all of it is about what Google reads.

The sentence under your blue link is something you can write for each product. It lives in the product’s Search engine listing section in the admin, and if you leave it blank, Shopify’s guide says Google can build one from what’s on the page, with the product description standing in. People call that sentence a meta description, and Avada’s meta tags feature is there to fill it in.

Next is the photo’s alt text, a short written description of the mug photo. Screen readers say it aloud to people who can’t see the picture, and Google’s image guide says it uses alt text, along with the rest of the page, to work out what a photo shows. Avada’s alt text optimizer writes it for your photos.

Avada also builds a sitemap, which is a list of your store’s pages for Google, and adds structured data, which is labels in the page that tell Google things like the mug’s price in a format it reads directly. Avada’s App Store listing puts meta tags, the alt text optimizer, an HTML sitemap, basic structured data, the basic speed booster, and 100 image optimizations on the free plan.

So what is the speed booster? The listing describes it as lazy loading and minification, plus image compression, with the Basic booster on the free plan, Turbo on Pro, and Rocket on Enterprise.

Lazy loading means photos further down the page wait until the shopper scrolls near them. Minification means squeezing the spaces and notes out of the code files so they’re smaller to download, and image compression makes the stored mug photo a smaller file.

Now Whoosh, which writes nothing for Google. When the mug page opens, your other apps start loading too: the email popup, the chat bubble, the review stars, each one a small program from another company. Whoosh holds those programs back until the mug photo is on screen, and it fetches that photo early, knowing which one it is from what real shoppers saw on the page.

It also gets the page they’re most likely to open next ready before they tap, and it never does that for the cart, checkout, or account pages. To show whether any of it helped, Whoosh splits your visitors 50/50, half with it on and half without, and compares sales. It doesn’t copy your theme, and there’s no code to write.

Why the speed booster leaves the popup where it was

If you were hoping one app would do both jobs, this is the awkward part. Avada’s speed booster and Whoosh are not the same job under two names. Avada makes files smaller, and photos lower down the page later. Whoosh decides what goes first.

I know what you’re thinking. You’ve already installed Avada and switched the booster on, so isn’t the page sorted? Lazy loading, minification, and image compression are the three things the listing names, and none of them is about the order your other apps run in. If the email popup’s program ran before the mug photo yesterday, a smaller file doesn’t move it behind the photo today.

That cuts the other way too. If the sentence under your mug’s link is empty, or the mug photo’s alt text is blank, Whoosh won’t fill either one in, and Avada is the better buy. The same goes for a sitemap and structured data. You can start on Avada’s free plan, and Whoosh doesn’t have one.

Whoosh is the buy when the listing is fine and the page is the problem. A popup, a chat bubble, or a reviews box shows up before the mug does, and you want to see in your own sales whether fixing that mattered. TileCloud ran that 50/50 test and published a 15% conversion lift, which is one store’s result and not a forecast for your mug.

Can the two share a store? Yes, because they’re doing different jobs. Avada writes the words and squeezes the photos, while Whoosh changes when your other apps run. Whichever you install, open the mug page on your phone afterwards and tap the popup, the chat, and Add to cart, so you know each one still works.

Check the mug’s listing, then the mug’s page

Two checks, one product. Do the listing first, because it only takes a minute.

In your Shopify admin, open Products and click the mug, then scroll to Search engine listing and read the sentence there. If it’s empty, or it’s just the first words of your product description, that’s the gap Avada fills. It’s also a sentence you can write yourself, and the meta description example shows the shape: what the thing is first, then why to buy it from you.

While you’re on the product, click the mug photo and look at its alt text box. A blank box there is the other half of Avada’s job, and you can type a plain description in yourself just as easily.

Now the page. Open the mug’s live link on your phone, the same one a shopper gets from Google, in a private tab so nothing is remembered from last time. Watch the first moments closely. Does the mug photo arrive first, or does a signup popup, a chat bubble, or a row of review stars beat it?

If you want it in writing, do the same on a laptop in Chrome. Right-click the page and choose Inspect, which opens a panel of tools beside it, then click Network, tick Disable cache, and reload. Find the mug photo in that list, and look for a file from the popup or chat company that finished ahead of it.

If that popup is Klaviyo’s email signup, the Klaviyo walkthrough follows that one file from start to finish.

Now you know which screen let the mug down. An empty sentence or a blank alt text box is Avada’s job, and its free plan is a fair place to start. A popup or chat beating the mug photo is ours. If both turned up, fix the listing first, since writing a sentence costs nothing, then test the page.

Last of all, search for the mug on your phone the way a stranger would. Read your own sentence under the link, tap it, and check that the speckled mug you just read about is the first thing on the screen.