🤖 Ask Sidekick

What is Sidekick?

Sidekick is Shopify's built-in AI assistant in your Shopify Admin. Once Avada Speed is installed, you can chat with Sidekick to check your store's speed and image optimization — and even start an optimization — without opening the app.

Everything Sidekick tells you comes from your real Avada Speed data, the same numbers you'd see in the app.

Why use Sidekick?

• Answers in the flow of work — ask about your speed while you're already in Shopify Admin.
• Plain-language answers — get your score, your image savings, or what to fix, in a sentence.
• Start optimizing from chat — kick off image compression and alt text without leaving the conversation.
• No setup — it works automatically as soon as Avada Speed is installed.

How to access

1. Open your Shopify Admin.
2. Open Sidekick (Shopify's AI assistant).
3. Ask a question about your store's speed or images — see the examples below.

No extra setup is needed. Sidekick can read your Avada Speed data as soon as the app is installed.

💬 What you can ask

Ask Sidekick about your store and it pulls the answer from Avada Speed:

• Your speed score — “What's my page speed score?” → your PageSpeed score and Core Web Vitals (LCP, FCP, TBT, CLS).
• A deeper audit — “Why is my store slow? What should I fix?” → a ranked list of the top issues to fix (takes a little longer than the score check).
• Which optimizations are on — “Which speed features are turned on?” → the on/off status of features like minify, lazy load, preload, critical CSS, and font swap.
• Your image results — “How many images have I compressed? How much storage have I saved?” → compressed image count, alt-text count, and storage saved.
• Your image settings — “How is image compression set up?” → compression and alt-text status plus your quality level.
• Recent activity — “What did I optimize recently?” → your latest compression and alt-text runs, newest first.

⚡ What you can do

Beyond answering questions, Sidekick can start an image optimization for you:

Step 1: Ask Sidekick to optimize

Type something like “Compress my images”, “Generate alt text”, or “Optimize my images”.

Step 2: Confirm what to run

Sidekick opens a short Optimize images confirmation in Avada Speed. Choose what to run:

• Compress images — shrink file sizes on images that aren't optimized yet.
• Generate AI alt text — add alt text to images that don't have any.

Pick at least one, then click Start optimization.

Step 3: Let it run

The optimization runs in the background — you can keep working in Shopify. Nothing starts until you confirm, so you're always in control.

📌 Merchant Notes

• Sidekick only reads your data and starts jobs you confirm — it never changes anything on its own.
• For a quick number, ask for your score; for why you're slow and what to fix, ask for an audit — that's the same deep scan as Speed audit.
• Optimizations you start from Sidekick show up in your Image optimizer history, just like jobs you run in the app.