Welcome to our first monthly update!

The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data for September 2024 is now live, and I’ve updated Theme Vitals to add the new data. In this post, I’ll cover:

  • The new aggregated theme data feature and analysis
  • Most improved themes for web performance
  • Highest growth themes in market share

New feature: Aggregated performance across all themes

This month, I’ve added a new chart on the home page that shows how all the themes are performing overall. Here’s the screenshot for the mobile data:

Percent of websites passing each metric for each theme. See the website for a fully accessible HTML table with data.

The way to read this data is, for example:

For Largest Contentful Paint, the worst performing Shopify theme reported here had an LCP passing rate of 66.6%. The median theme was at 91.4% passing. The highest performing theme had 98.7% of websites using it passing the LCP good threshold.

In the future, I would like to build out an interactive chart for this data.

Aggregated data analysis

This new data allows us to make some interesting insights. As expected, most performance improves on desktop compared to mobile devices. This is usually due to higher powered processors and faster connections.

For example, INP sees a massive improvement in both minimum and median. The minimum for passing INP on desktop is 95.8%!

LCP improves in terms of median performance, but the minimum lags. This tells me we probably have a long tail of themes that struggle with underlying LCP issues that aren’t impacted as much by device. For example, late-discovered images (e.g., from lazy loading the LCP) would still likely go over the good LCP threshold.

CLS is a big exception to this trend. CLS performance tanks on desktop. This is partially because larger screens have more real estate and thus more opportunities for shifting content to be a problem.

Most improved themes in September 2024

For mobile devices, these themes had the most improvement in passing all Core Web Vitals:

  1. Launch
  2. Gain
  3. Align
  4. Woodstock
  5. Charge

For desktop devices, these themes improved the most:

  1. Boundless
  2. Mavon
  3. Momentum
  4. Artisan
  5. Gem

This is the first month I’ve calculated this metric. Most of these themes have a smaller number of origins/market share in the CrUX data set. Many of these likely published improvements to their theme. However, fewer data points also means it’s easier to have larger swings in their aggregations from the underlying population of websites changing. So, I may need to come up with some additional measures to get a fuller picture of the data. If you have ideas, let me know!

Highest market growth in September 2024

As a reminder, the market share numbers calculated in Theme Vitals are not the same as number of installs. Here, we’re calculating market share based on the number of origins (websites/domains) in CrUX. CrUX only shares data for websites that reach a certain threshold of popularity. This threshold sometimes changes. To learn more, check out the methodology page for CrUX.

Growth in number of origins

Probably unsurprising, but the themes that already had the largest market shares also mostly had the highest growth in number of origins:

Mobile

  1. Dawn
  2. Trade
  3. Prestige
  4. Refresh
  5. Craft

Desktop

  1. Dawn
  2. Prestige
  3. Debut (vintage)
  4. Refresh
  5. Impulse

The one exception is the Trade theme, which is a free Shopify theme but focused on the wholesale market.

Most of these are also free Shopify themes. I was disappointed to see the vintage theme Debut listed as growing. The two themes that are not free Shopify themes are Prestige, by Maestrooo, and Impulse, by Archetype.

Percent growth in origins

I decided to take another approach to see which themes had the highest growth rates versus raw numbers. These are some pretty big numbers, and I hope these agencies and theme developers are seeing it reflected in their sales growth as well.

Mobile

  1. Trade (37%)
  2. Digital (29%)
  3. Minimalista (24%)
  4. Eurus (20%)
  5. Mavon (19.5%)

Desktop

  1. Digital (38%)
  2. Trade (36%)
  3. Baseline (32%)
  4. Minimalista (30%)
  5. Multi (24%)

Closing

It was exciting to process my first monthly update and come up with some data analysis I hoped you would find interesting. If you have ideas for additional analyses, let me know! I’d love to keep this monthly update fresh and interesting.

The Theme Vitals site and this newsletter are meant to be a helpful resource to the Shopify community. As always, if you have ideas for new features or other improvements, let me know!

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