Welcome to the second monthly update! Consider sponsoring this newsletter to support the work behind this project.

The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data for October 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
  • Newly added and dropped themes
  • Most improved themes for web performance
  • Highest growth themes in market share
  • New Shopify theme properties available for analysis in the future

Aggregated performance across all themes

Here are the median, min, and max performance numbers on mobile for all the Shopify themes measured on mobile devices:

Percent of websites passing each metric for each theme - see website for a fully accessible table which will work better with assistive technology

On mobile devices, the median for passing all Core Web Vitals (CWV) improved by 1.3 percentage points (pp). Median LCP improved by 0.4pp, CLS by 0.6pp, and INP by 0.5pp.

On desktop devices, improvement was only 0.1pp for passing all CWV.

I find it counterintuitive that the median percent of websites passing all CWV is now ever so slightly higher on mobile than desktop (81.3 vs 81.2%). CLS seems to be the culprit for desktop performance not being higher. With more viewport real estate, CLS is failing at a higher rate.

Newly added and dropped themes

Electro, Rise, Sleek, Sydney, and Avante all reached the minimum threshold of origins (50) and are new to Theme Vitals this month. Only Drop was, well, dropped.

Most improved themes in October 2024

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

  1. Cornerstone
  2. Veena
  3. Monaco
  4. Xclusive
  5. Stiletto

For desktop devices, these themes improved the most:

  1. Blum
  2. Gain
  3. Fame
  4. Viola
  5. Label

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.

Highest market growth in October 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

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. Craft
  5. Impact

Desktop

  1. Dawn
  2. Impact
  3. Prestige
  4. Symmetry
  5. Enterprise

Like last month, 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. Thankfully, the vintage theme Debut dropped from the top 5 growth list.

The themes that are not free Shopify themes are Prestige and Impact, by Maestrooo, and Symmetry and Enterprise, by Clean Canvas Ltd. The last two are also new to the top 5 market growth list.

Percent growth in origins

Raw growth is interesting but focuses too much on the existing themes with high market share. It’s also interesting to see which ones are growing the fastest on a percentage basis, which are listed below.

Mobile

  1. Essence (28%)
  2. Trade (21%)
  3. Eurus (19%)
  4. Digital (19%)
  5. Blum (18%)

Desktop

  1. Express (26%)
  2. Trade (22%)
  3. Blum (20%)
  4. Essence (18%)
  5. Concept (17%)

New Shopify theme properties available for analysis in the future

With the changes in the performance real user monitoring used internally at Shopify, the old boomerang performance script was dropped. Many theme and app developers used it for data about theme store name and theme version numbers. To make up for that loss of data, the Shopify engineering team was gracious to add it to the global Shopify JavaScript object. This object is what is collected in HTTPArchive and allows me to split out performance data by Shopify theme. Thus, in the future, I hope to also provide a more accurate split of performance by theme id/name as well as adding a split by theme version number.

Closing

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!

Also, to help keep this project going, I’m looking for a marquee sponsor that will be featured on both the website and in the newsletter. If you’re interested in being featured, let me know!

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