August 2025 Theme Vitals Update

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The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data for August 2025 is now live on Theme Vitals. In this post, I’ll cover:

• Change in the data population
• Aggregated theme performance changes
• Update on new flagship Shopify theme Horizon
• Most improved themes for web performance
• Highest growth themes in market share

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Change in data population

• The total number of Shopify websites increased slightly on desktop and jumped up by 13K on mobile devices.
• New themes added this month were Megastore, Edge, Grove, Allure, Noblesse, Lyra, Adorn, and Genie.
• These themes were dropped due to lack of data: Start, Satoshi, Cypress, and Flex.
• I now show 316 (up from 312) total themes.

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:

(For a more accessible version, see it live on the website: Aggregations).

Performance improved on LCP and INP for mobile, increasing the "passing all CWV" metric as well. Part of this was due to an Android OS fix, so we're getting closer to where the numbers were before that bug. On desktop, CLS improved slightly.

Update on new flagship Shopify theme Horizon

Horizon still seems to be struggling. It's improving each month, but 11th from the bottom on CWV rankings by theme (2 of the worse themes are variations). This is with 16% of the sites on version 1.0, 47% on 2.0, and 37% on 2.1.

Here's the mobile performance data for this month:

• only 61% of websites pass all Core Web Vitals (up from 51.6%, due to INP improvements)
• 83.7% pass LCP (down slightly from 83.8%)
• 97.6% pass CLS (down slightly from 98.3%)
• only 57.6% pass INP (up from 45.8%)

All of the Horizon variations are now in the rankings, and all perform similarly to Horizon.

As a reminder, the team said that the biggest improvements are on versions 2.0.1 and above. They recommend that everyone to update to at least v2.1.0 if they haven't yet already.

See full data on the Horizon theme page.

Most improved themes

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

1. Fabric: 20.0 points (309 origins)
2. Dwell: 17.6 points (274 origins)
3. Atelier: 15.0 points (436 origins)
4. Ritual: 13.5 points (122 origins)
5. Vessel: 12.9 points (277 origins)

For desktop devices, these themes improved the most:

1. Gain: 6.9 points (99 origins)
2. Paper: 5.3 points (122 origins)
3. Gem: 5.3 points (78 origins)
4. Align: 4.9 points (100 origins)
5. Yuva: 4.8 points (498 origins)

When themes on these lists have a small number of origins/market share, some of the improvements could be due to the underlying population of websites changing.

Highest market growth

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 have the largest market shares usually have the highest growth in number of origins. This is the first time that the new flagship theme Horizon has broken into the top 5.

Mobile

Only Prestige is a non-flagship theme:

1. Dawn: 2822
2. Horizon: 1048
3. Prestige: 384
4. Savor: 299
5. Atelier: 269

Desktop

1. Dawn: 792
2. Horizon: 360
3. Concept: 141
4. Savor: 108
5. Enterprise: 99

Percent growth in origins

Raw growth is interesting but usually focuses too much on the existing themes with high market share. Here, I show which themes are growing the fastest on a percentage basis. It's no surprise that Horizon is leading here.

Mobile

All are Horizon variations:

1. Horizon: 171.2%
2. Atelier: 161.1%
3. Pitch: 152.5%
4. Tinker: 130.3%
5. Savor: 117.7%

Desktop

All are Horizon variations:

1. Atelier: 235.5%
2. Tinker: 212.5%
3. Horizon: 179.1%
4. Savor: 152.1%
5. Fabric: 151.2%

Closing

The Theme Vitals site and this newsletter are meant to be a helpful resource to the Shopify community. Consider sponsoring or upgrading to a paid subscription to help develop new features.

As always, if you have ideas for new features or other improvements, let me know!

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