The fastest Shopify themes: Audit of every official O.S. 2.0 theme (2022)

A list of every official Shopify theme, ranked by their Performance score average. Google Lighthouse audit of three different pages per theme, and multiple iterations for accurate results.

If you’re trying to pick a theme for your Shopify store, you need to consider many different aspects and features.

A very important one, is speed.

It’s one of the most basic factors of user experience.

And Shopify store speed can be affected by two main factors: The theme and its apps. Since apps can vary per store, we ran an experiment to determine the fastest Shopify themes.

First, some details about the audit.

Method and parameters

• Only officially approved themes from the Shopify theme store were reviewed
• Only Online Store 2.0 themes were reviewed
• The Lighthouse Node.js package was used to run the audits on a headless Chrome browser
• The themes were installed on a fresh development store
• The Home, Collection and Product pages were tested
• Every theme’s Home page was customized to only include the Featured collection section
• Since the themes were in preview, the preview bar assets were loaded during audits
• The audits are on an emulated Moto G4 with slow 4G throttling
• Every theme was audited 7 times, and the worst scoring repetition was excluded
• Repetitions ran in full cycles (Theme A, Theme B etc. * 7 instead of Theme A * 7, Theme B * 7 etc.)
• The themes were ranked by average performance score over all three pages
• The Modular theme didn’t work with Lighthouse and is excluded

Results

Theme	Average	Collections	Product	Home
Cascade	55	56	52	58
Split	55	58	43	64
Kingdom	53	53	45	61
Colorblock	52	54	41	61
Highlight	52	48	43	64
Sunrise	52	49	44	63
Ride	51	53	42	59
Boost	51	40	52	59
Dawn	50	48	43	60
Studio	49	52	39	57
Crave	49	52	38	57
Avenue	49	45	48	54
Sense	49	51	38	58
Craft	49	51	38	57
Focal	47	45	35	62
District	46	41	37	61
Alchemy	46	39	44	54
Avatar	46	52	30	55
Warehouse	45	43	32	61
Parallax	45	33	49	52
Influence	44	48	31	54
Taste	44	43	37	52
Empire	44	49	27	55
Prestige	43	38	33	59
Context	43	51	33	46
Editions	43	39	29	60
Fashionopolism	42	56	22	50
Foodie	42	42	40	45
Impulse	42	53	29	44
Drop	42	51	25	50
Bullet	41	35	37	51
Testament	41	36	36	50
Canopy	41	37	34	52
Showcase	41	30	44	48
California	41	33	33	56
Colors	40	37	30	53
Startup	40	33	28	58
Icon	40	53	18	48
Expression	39	38	30	50
Palo Alto	39	47	25	45
Launch	39	36	28	52
Mr Parker	38	37	24	55
Streamline	38	32	30	53
Maker	38	29	34	51
Providence	38	40	27	48
Andaman	38	43	26	46
Be Yours	38	35	26	52
Grid	37	36	30	46
Masonry	37	34	31	48
Editorial	37	36	32	44
Shapes	37	30	34	48
Mojave	37	39	16	57
Emerge	37	27	28	55
Tailor	37	37	28	45
Broadcast	36	31	27	51
Story	36	33	31	45
Fresh	36	29	27	52
Symmetry	36	30	29	47
Spark	35	31	26	49
Responsive	35	29	26	50
Envy	35	29	27	50
North	35	37	21	46
Motion	35	34	27	43
Flow	34	27	31	46
Ira	34	32	27	45
Beyond	34	27	33	43
Pacific	34	28	22	52
Retina	34	32	27	43
Expanse	34	34	25	43
Pipeline	33	20	34	44
Blockshop	32	28	23	47
Vantage	32	32	22	43
Atlantic	32	30	20	47
Baseline	31	28	23	43
Label	29	28	21	37
Lorenza	27	29	27	27
Venue	27	30	14	39
Galleria	27	21	24	36
Capital	25	28	20	27
Loft	25	20	23	31

Disclaimer

The above results should not be considered in an isolated way, when choosing a theme.

For example, we might see a very low score because a theme has a lot of features that others don’t. Since these are native to it, you wouldn’t need to install apps with the same functionality. Whereas if you installed the apps on a better performing theme, it might turn out to do worse than the low performer.

Also, there are cases where Lighthouse performance isn’t completely representative of real performance. The score is calculated programmatically. So some small detail might be lowering one of the metrics to a non-representative degree. This is why you might see a difference between real usage scores and lab scores on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

Conclusion

Theme speed is definitely important for an online store. Developers, designers and other professionals will often run a Lighthouse or PageSpeed Insights (which uses Lighthouse) report to see where a theme stands. And of course, the Shopify speed score is based on Lighthouse.

So as we saw, the above raw numbers should not be considered in isolation, but they can save you a lot of time analyzing and comparing these themes.

Thanks for reading!