April 2026 Theme Vitals Update

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The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data for April 2026 is now live on Theme Vitals. In this post, I’ll cover:

1. Change in the data population
2. Shopify overall performance changes
3. Number of themes with improved (and worsened) performance
4. Update on new flagship Shopify theme Horizon
5. Most improved themes for web performance
6. Highest growth themes in market share

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Change in data population

• The total number of Shopify websites increased slightly by 0.01% for both mobile and desktop devices.
• New themes added this month: Prompt, Atlas, Nexa, Zeal, Zap, Dynamic, Gentech.
• Themes dropped due to not enough data: none.
• I now show 355 (up from 348) total themes. 242 have performance data for mobile devices and 206 for desktop devices.

Shopify overall performance changes

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).

• Websites passing All Core Web Vitals decreased by 0.60 percentage points to 85.80%. On desktop devices, it decreased by 0.35 percentage points to 85.75%.
• Websites passing Largest Contentful Paint decreased by 0.20 percentage points to 93.10%. On desktop devices, it decreased by 0.10 percentage points to 97.90%.
• Websites passing Cumulative Layout Shift decreased by 0.30 percentage points to 95.80%. On desktop devices, it increased by 0.25 percentage points to 88.60%.
• Websites passing Interaction to Next Paint decreased by 0.10 percentage points to 95.60%. On desktop devices, it stayed the same at 100.00%.

Number of themes with improved (and worsened) performance

This month, about 2/3 of the themes worsened in performance on mobile and more than half on desktop.

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

Update on new flagship Shopify theme Horizon

Horizon improvements have stalled leaving it as a low-performing theme.

This is particularly true for mobile which suffers poor performance for loading speed and response to interactions:

The native Shopify published data looks better due to combining desktop and mobile numbers as well as the inclusion of Safari data. If your target market includes customers with Android phones, I would be cautious about using Horizon and its variants.

As a reminder, here are the differences in our data populations:

• Their data only shows the last 3 version releases, not all versions live on websites.
• Our data includes only websites covered in the Chrome User Experience Report, about 600K, while theirs includes all sites using a custom domain (not using myshopify.com).
• Similarly, our data only reports Chrome on Chromium. On mobile devices, this means mostly Android. The biggest difference is that their data includes iPhones which is a large chunk of US and Canadian shoppers.
• Their data combines mobile and desktop so some of the nuance is lost in averaging.

As it stands, Horizon is ranked 216th out of 242 themes on mobile performance, which is where most ecommerce traffic lives now.

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:

1. Desert: 11.0 points (91 origins)
2. Normcore: 7.6 points (71 origins)
3. Artisan: 6.4 points (91 origins)
4. Nordic: 6.0 points (131 origins)
5. Next: 5.6 points (283 origins)

For desktop devices, these themes improved the most:

1. Volume: 7.3 points (57 origins)
2. Fame: 6.1 points (76 origins)
3. Boundless: 5.4 points (224 origins)
4. Portland: 4.9 points (58 origins)
5. Upscale: 4.5 points (60 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.

Mobile

1. Horizon: 2554
2. Tinker: 335
3. Atelier: 213
4. Savor: 200
5. Hyper: 198

Desktop

1. Horizon: 592
2. Hyper: 139
3. Tinker: 109
4. Savor: 59
5. Concept: 56

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.

Mobile

1. Zenith: 71.7%
2. Edge: 28.7%
3. Maximize: 27.9%
4. Victory: 24.4%
5. Desert: 23.0%

Desktop

1. Zenith: 76.7%
2. Maximize: 33.3%
3. Krank: 30.0%
4. Aesthetic: 24.4%
5. Futurer: 18.2%

Closing

Don't forget to check for the latest updates for the Fastest Shopify Themes.

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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