May 2026 Theme Vitals Update

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The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data for May 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 mobile. Desktop stayed about the same.
• New themes added this month: Athora, July, Shift.
• Themes dropped due to not enough data: Seasons.
• I now show 357 (up from 355) total themes. 243 have performance data for mobile devices and 207 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).

Overall, things are looking up this month:

• Websites passing All Core Web Vitals on mobile increased by 0.30 percentage points to 86.10%. On desktop devices, it increased by 0.25 percentage points to 86.00%.
• Websites passing Largest Contentful Paint on mobile increased by 0.70 percentage points to 93.80%. On desktop devices, it increased by 0.30 percentage points to 98.20%.
• Websites passing Cumulative Layout Shift on mobile increased by 0.60 percentage points to 96.40%. On desktop devices, it increased by 0.50 percentage points to 89.10%.
• Websites passing Interaction to Next Paint on mobile websites passing Interaction to Next Paint decreased by 0.10 percentage points to 95.50%. 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 improved in performance on mobile and 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 makes three months with no meaningful change in performance. As such, I might drop this as a special topic next month if it continues.

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.

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. Primavera: 9.1 points (58 origins)
2. Startup: 6.1 points (199 origins)
3. Infinity: 6.0 points (74 origins)
4. React: 5.8 points (58 origins)
5. Mavon: 5.7 points (197 origins)

For desktop devices, these themes improved the most:

1. Maximize: 11.8 points (87 origins)
2. Nordic: 11.4 points (69 origins)
3. Barcelona: 8.9 points (67 origins)
4. Aesthetic: 6.7 points (58 origins)
5. Kagami: 6.5 points (54 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: 2147
2. Tinker: 284
3. Prestige: 167
4. Hyper: 151
5. Savor: 132

Desktop

1. Horizon: 712
2. Concept: 86
3. Tinker: 79
4. Hyper: 72
5. Atelier: 67

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. Pebble: 111.1%
2. Maximize: 24.5%
3. Zenith: 22.8%
4. Victory: 21.6%
5. Krank: 21.3%

Desktop

1. Zenith: 30.2%
2. Purity: 20.8%
3. Maximize: 20.8%
4. Edge: 17.4%
5. Paris: 15.6%

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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