The Fastest Shopify Themes in 2025

As of Aug 2025, the fastest theme on mobile devices was Exhibit, and on desktop it was Essence.

The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) publishes data for the previous month on second Tuesdays (e.g., August data is published on the second Tuesday in September).

This site is updated every month with that data, and the current latest data is from Aug 2025.

Colloquially, we refer to web performance as "speed", but Google helped the industry coalesce around the Core Web Vitals (CWV). The CWV measure loading speed, layout stability, and responsiveness to interaction.

The scores shown here are the number of websites using that theme where at least 75% of users experience good performance on all 3 Core Web Vitals as reported in CrUX.

According to Google at the time of writing, "We highly recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to ensure a great user experience generally. This, along with other page experience aspects, aligns with what our core ranking systems seek to reward." Google Search Central

It's complicated.

If you've already customized your theme, then it makes sense to continue customizing it with performance improvements. If you customized it in a way that makes it easier to keep up with new version updates from the original developer, then you may be able to get performance improvements with less effort by updating.

If you have not yet customized your theme, then you must consider the downsides of doing so. Once you begin customizing your theme, it will no longer be automatically updated when a new version is published. You will need to hire a developer to update the theme manually and make any other customizations.

If you're considering a redesign, it would be a good idea to check the performance for your favorite themes by design and features. You can see the full list of themes on the themes page.

If you need help with your performance, contact us to schedule an introductory call.

Both are important. However, if you choose a theme with poor performance, it will only get worse as you add apps and tag managers. If you start with a high performance theme, you will have a bit more "budget" for installing apps.

This page shows only the top performing themes. To find all themes with available data from the Chrome User Experience Report, go to the all themes page.

Lighthouse is useful for testing before and after you make changes or for debugging. However, it is sub-par for performance comparisons like this for two main reasons.

First, it can be easily gamed. Unfortunately, many scammers on sites like Fiverr and more will charge merchants for "speed services" when they are really just installing a script that detects when a tool like Lighthouse is being run and will, for example, skip all scripts loading resulting in a fake score.

Second, Lighthouse does not represent the real world well. It is a single test run on a single device using an emulated mid- to low-range phone and emulated network speed. The algorithms used do no reflect how real world devices and networks behave nor do they account for a user's location (latency impacts performance). Additionally, the breadth and variation of user experiences would be impossible to even attempt to emulate.

In closing, we don't care about performance for performance's sake. Having a Lighthouse score of 100 means nothing to a user. However, if the page loads fast and isn't frustrating to use, then they are more likely to stay and complete a purchase.