What is the fastest Shopify theme?
There is more to life than simply increasing its speed.
— Mahatma Gandhi
Of course, I’m aware of the Google ranking update, web vitals is officially in the ranking factors now.
It’s obvious that the page speed is always correlated with conversion rate and profit. The faster store leads to more conversions and profit.
At the same time, the page speed is not a primary task you should care about. If your store uses a modern recently updated theme, you don’t overwhelm the storefront with numerous apps, your pages have laconic content without huge video and sliders — your store is good enough and you may focus on your product, customer service, email marketing, etc.
To make sure, you can check the funny tool created by Kurt & Paul from Ethercycle Shopify Plus partner — https://ethercycle.com/tester/
If you still have questions and you want to dive deeper into this topic, the following answers to the questions can help you.
What page speed score I will get on my store?
You find a fast theme with great score. Purchase, install, configure, test and get lower score. Why? The features, apps and content influence on the page speed score.
Usually, when you browsing the themes you see the demo stores. The main purpose of a demo store to showcase the theme. It doesn’t include apps, your content and configuration. Be ready to get lower page speed score on your store.
How to test the theme speed?
Select demo store
Each theme has multiple demo stores. Select the demo that is showcase the theme features and configuration as close to your requirements as possible. Consider the same amount of content on the page.
Pages to test
Home page
Collection page
Product page
Tools
1) Lighthouse — is the best engine.
It used by Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Shopify Online store speed report and Chrome web developer tools.
2) Web developer tools, network tab to view the total page load time and size.
Lighthouse user agent
Since Google added web vitals to the ranking algorithm everyone wants to get higher speed score results. Unfortunately, it is hard to increase page speed stats. It requires significant code changes, content review, apps optimization, etc. Unfortunately, there is an easy way to manipulate the test results. The web developer may check the browser user agent. If it equals to “Chrome-Lighthouse” the developer may show different page code, with higher page speed score. So when you test store, you see the high scores, but the real visitors see the slower web page.
You may set the browser user agent at web developer tools and check if you see the same web page. Check this video for more details on how to detect user agent manipulation.
What themes to test?
Popular themes from Shopify Theme store — https://themes.shopify.com/
- Dawn
- Impulse
- Prestige
- Warehouse
- Symmetry
Popular themes from Themeforest — https://themeforest.net/
- Ella
- Wokiee
- Minimog
- Kalles
- Shella
Highly advertised themes
- Booster
- Flex
- Turbo
- Shoptimized
- Debutify
What is the fastest Shopify theme?
The simple answer is Dawn Shopify theme.
Full test log you may check at this file. You may review results of all themes for all pages.
I used PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse 9.0.0) as testing tool.
I used 1.0 coefficient for mobile results and 0.5 coefficient for desktop results. Due to mobile traffic importance and complexity of fast page for mobile.
The top 3 themes are: Dawn, Booster and Shella.
Dawn
pros: fastest, free, developed by Shopify
cons: simplest, includes only basic features
Booster
pros: fast, additional features
cons: expensive
Shella
pros: fast, tons of features, affordable price, developed by Shopify Expert
cons: takes more time to learn all features
Write down your requirements, compare with theme features, select the theme that better suits your needs.
I hope my article helps you. And now you got the answer what theme is best for your store.
Is it possible to make a fast page with lots of content and features?
No.
The idea of Google is to simplify web pages. One page should focus on one thing and provide a limited, important piece of information about it. Keep in mind, by adding additional features you pay with page speed score.
With the Shella theme, you may see the correlation features and page speed score. You may configure it as fast as the Dawn theme. That makes it very flexible and my favorite theme.
