What's the fastest theme for mobile eCommerce sites?

[kprimdal]

So I want to know who has the fastest free or premium them and thought let's make it a collaborative adventure.

I'm looking at Google Pagespeed Insights since it gives me an overall score (I know there are many opinions about this, but at least it is common across all of them). I'm sitting in Denmark when I do the test, so it can have some effect when you are doing the test and you may be testing from another test center. Also, I'm only looking at mobile, because let's face it the majority of users are coming from mobile nowadays

Here are the themes I have tried right now, sorted in what I believe is the fastest: (I hope I can change this later when more is coming)

1. Air Theme One - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 94
2. Debut theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 77
3. Plak Theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 70 
4. Booster theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 69
5. Brooklyn - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 51  
6. Ella - Demo - PageSpeed Score:  41
7. Shella - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 33  
8. Prestige - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 26
9. Turbo Theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 25 
10. Boostheme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 23 
11. Flex theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 22
12. Fastor - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 20
13. Debutify - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 4
14. Shoptimized - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 2

What are your favorite themes?

[MatthiasMoeller]

I use Brooklyn theme at my store. Would be nice to see its score at your list! 

[kprimdal]

@MatthiasMoeller it is taking a 5th place

[Adel-coder]

My favorite one is Plak, it has the the best score in Gtmetrix.

Their support is great, I paid 79$ for them and they removed some unused features, on my shopify store it shows ( 75% score, you store is faster than similar stores)

[kprimdal]

@Adel-coder great to hear. I think those $75 was worth it since lots of themes often load a lot of unused code, so nice to know they are actually doing something about that.

[Nicholas_Benne1]

I was thinking of changing one of my website's themes to Plak - BUT.... I have contacted their 'support' with a few basic questions (answer not available in their forums) and after 6 days, and repeated request, still have no response other than an auto-mailer saying they'll get back to me "in a few hours" - yeah right! Not good.

[MPI_themes]

True.

Support service, recent updates are a clue for success in the theme development business.

Please check my rating of the fast Shopify themes - https://medium.com/@maripetrenko/what-is-the-fastest-shopify-theme-bd4eaf634164

[CodingLover]

Comparing themes speed is more than comparing their demos, you need also to check the features :

For example, let's compare Plak demo and Air Theme Demo

• Air Theme One - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 94
• Plak Theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 70 

Air theme one features compared to Plak : 

- there is no meganu, no currency converter, no sliders, no parallax, no top freeshipping bar, no testimonial sliders, no blog posts featured, no sidebar filter, no countdown, ...

If you add those features to that theme, the score will surely goes down from 94% to less than 70% or even less than 50%

Google speed insight is not the only you should use, you can also compare the speed using Gtmetrix or other speed test tools

1.  

[kprimdal]

@CodingLover I agree there are big differences in what all the themes offer in features. But then again a great theme should be able to offer lots of features and still perform well, just like it looks like plak is actually doing.

And I could also have used GTmetrix, Pingdom, or Webpagetest, and so on, but I chose to go with PageSpeed Insight since I believe that is what most novice users are using and knows. Also, GTmetrix is not giving me the option to test with mobile unless I'm a pro user.

[CodingLover]

You're right ^^ anyway I am not fun of the themes (booster & debutify) their homepage looks like a spam website, they advertise their as fast or even (the fastest) but actually they are pretty slow and have some features which kill conversion rate like (who is viewing this product, ...)

The top 3 themes you mentioned are great for conversion rate, since they are not only fast, but simple in design and looks legit

[OpenThinking]

Hi,

I'd like to introduce you our Bullet theme, we built it with Speed and simplicity in mind. And honestly it is one of the fastest themes out there.

Bullet has a PageSpeed score of 98 (on desktop) out of 100 and a Shopify Speed Score of 76. And also a SEO score of 72 (source: seobility) thanks to our integrated SEO engine.

You can check it out here.

cheers,
Jack.

p.s: Data from tests conducted over the homepage on 18/may/2020

[kprimdal]

@OpenThinking on mobile I don't get the score you are claiming, I only get 84 as the highest. Which is still really solid, and enough for a 2nd place so far:

Unfortunately I cannot edit the first post anymore, so here are the updated list:

1. Air Theme One - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 94
2. Bullet - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 84
3. Debut theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 77
4. Plak Theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 70 
5. Booster theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 69
6. Brooklyn - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 51  
7. Ella - Demo - PageSpeed Score:  41
8. Shella - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 33  
9. Prestige - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 26
10. Turbo Theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 25 
11. Boostheme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 23 
12. Flex theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 22
13. Fastor - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 20
14. Debutify - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 4
15. Shoptimized - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 2

[oreoorbitz]

Hey guys, interesting thread.

Important thing to keep in mind when comparing theme preformance is which sections are on the home page. If for instance you have a carousel as the first section, that will hsve more impact then just a image with overlay.

Also if you have a video section with YouTube video, that will hsve a huge impact on pagespeed score, depending on how the theme set up the video section. 

[davidkean]

Hi kprimdal,

I'm David from Boostheme team.

One of my themes you have used to test the Pagespeed score is Beloria. The Pagespeed score of my theme in your list is not correct. Beloria's Pagepseed score is now 92 on mobile, 95 on desktop. You can check the result at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbt-beloria-1.myshopi.... I have also developed other fastest Shopify themes such as Vodoma, Woodstock, and Shopcast. All of them have a high Pagespeed score. Even the score is also very good if you test my themes with GTMetrix, Pingdom, Webpagetest, or any other tools. This is the Pagespeed result of Vodoma (92 on mobile and 97 on desktop).

Note: this is the Pagespeed score when my themes have been added lots of features such as megamenu, currency converter, slider, Product Reviews app, free shipping bar, featured blog slider, countdown timer, progressive web app, quick view popup, add to cart popup and upsell products,... The homepage's content also contains at least 3 banner blocks, 2 product tab blocks ( each tab is a slider of products ). Air theme one does not have all these features, even the basic app like as Product Review app is not also installed on the demo store of this theme, so this theme should not be listed in your list.

[kprimdal]

 @oreoorbitz I agree, but that is not something the customers are maybe aware of. And I often tell people to try to run the demo site in PageSpeed Insight so you know if it is a fast theme. So if the developer has chosen a video or slider as the first section on mobile, then I'm wondering if they even think about the speed at all.

@davidkean  great to see you have improved the speed, I have updated the charts now. Also, you are absolutely correct, there is big difference in what all the theme offers in features. But even though they offer a lot of features your theme shows that it can still load fast.

1. Air Theme One - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 94
2. Boostheme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 92 (Note this is the Beloria theme, and they have many fast loading themes)
3. Debut theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 77
4. Plak Theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 70 
5. Booster theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 69
6. Brooklyn - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 51  
7. Ella - Demo - PageSpeed Score:  41
8. Shella - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 33  
9. Prestige - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 26
10. Turbo Theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 25 
11. Flex theme - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 22
12. Fastor - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 20
13. Debutify - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 4
14. Shoptimized - Demo - PageSpeed Score: 2

[PJAX]

I would recommend PLAK Theme over the others, not only for the speed or the SEO optimized theme, but also for their great customer support, those guys will never let you down.

More important, you must see other metrics :

Ex: if you have a large inventory, booster won't work as they don't have a filter sidebar, and the one on turbo doesn't work well, if you click on a tag then o a collection, the filters doesn't work, however the one on PLAK seems to be pretty well coded for both mobile and desktop it filters great !

Turbo uses the instant click script which increase the page transition speed, but the inconvenient, this script will conflict with some third party apps and some turbo features. Plak engineered a feature called (Blurry coupon) this features allows you to collect subscribers emails without the need of popups, thus this feature increases the conversion rate with high quality subscribers.

However, I wouldn't even think about Debut, even their own website looks spammy, i can't even trust them

You check it to see for yourself from this speed test tool: https://gtmetrix.com/

[MPI_themes]

@kprimdal thank you for your comparison list.

Please note, you should consider the page content, the number of features on the page when you compare the speed.

Regarding the Shella score. You took the main demo with a lot of enabled features, like MegaMenu, product options, and more. It simply has three times more content.

You also show the 33 number, however, it shows 52 for me - https://take.ms/ecpMt

Anyway, If you want to compare your theme with the Shella theme, please check the https://shella-fashion.myshopify.com/ demo. It has the same content and features and shows 97 points for me - https://take.ms/TqgyJ

[kprimdal]

That is an impressive PageSpeed score, I can however not replicate that from a local environment. It is like Google's lighthouse is not loading the needed javascript for your page, and that is the reason for the score.

But you are correct, it is not a fair comparison, and I regret a bit making this tread.

[Baldur_Helgason]

---

@kprimdal wrote:

... and I regret a bit making this tread.

---

Haha that’s a bit too harsh isn’t it? 😄

I think this is a good thread, I’m currently looking for an upgrade to my theme (using highly customised Minimal currently) and I’m glad this thread exists

[Baldur_Helgason]

---

@kprimdal wrote:

That is an impressive PageSpeed score, I can however not replicate that from a local environment. It is like Google's lighthouse is not loading the needed javascript for your page, and that is the reason for the score.

---

That’s correct. PSI shows a lot of errors if you scroll down. That might be the reason for this amazing score

[MPI_themes]

@kprimdal what local environment do you mean?

I checked at the Google Chrome web developer tools - https://take.ms/2DjGd

And didn't see an issues, the stats is lower compared to lighthouse web. I believe it is related to test environment.

[kprimdal]

When I said, "local environment" I meant lighthouse in chrome where the score is lower as you also see.

[MPI_themes]

@kprimdal talked to my developer.

The Chrome Lighthouse has version 6.4, the online Lighthouse has version 6.3. It may cause a difference. 

Another idea, remove theme features, make JavaScript code as small as possible. It will be interesting to see the page speed score for your theme when you add more features.

My answer to the question "Help me find the fastest Shopify theme" - the simplest theme is the fastest theme. I will consider creating a simple version of the Shella theme. To get an even higher speed score and check how it will influence the customer's satisfaction.

But speed is not a key feature for sales and conversions. Kurt Elster recently shows an example - https://take.ms/WyMIP. For sure the speed should be high. The store should be faster than similar stores on Shopify, it's about 75 score points.

Thank you for your work. I'm happy to see people like my team who care about the page speed performance.

[kprimdal]

---

@MPI_themes wrote:

But speed is not a key feature for sales and conversions. Kurt Elster recently shows an example - https://take.ms/WyMIP. For sure the speed should be high. The store should be faster than similar stores on Shopify, it's about 75 score points.

---

I agree as long as you want your customer to come from your marketing efforts, but let's wait and see what people are going to say as soon as Google is going to included Web Core Vitals in the page ranks.

Then I hope it is really going to benefits stores that has a lot better score than that, but only time is going to tell.

But yes, we both want our customers to have fast store 🙂

[Kat-EcomExperts]

Hey all, I just finished speed auditing the 100 most popular Shopify themes to find out which ones are the fastest (and slowest).

I thought you guys might find some of the results interesting. Might help when picking a new theme or switching to a new one. After all, slow load times kill conversions & google rankings.

I was testing demo stores advertised alongside themes. We used TestMyStoreSpeed.com, the tool that we built, and we tested more than 400 pages to find the best-performing ones. The top-performing Shopify themes have an overall score above 95, with an average load time below 2.5 seconds. The average for all themes is an 83.8 score. Load time is 2.8, page size 2.78, and 82.4 requests. Native Shopify themes rank the best for speed among competitors, with five themes in the top 15 fastest ones.

For comparison the average load time per page in the Shopify industry is 7.7s, the average page size is 2.9MB, and 119 requests per page.

According to my research, the fastest themes are Sunrise, Avon, and Kalles, each with a summary score of 99. Page speed score is based on the time it takes to load an average page on the site, as well as its adherence to performance guidelines.

If you wanted to see how your theme performed, I published the full results at:

https://ecomexperts.io/blogs/news/which-shopify-theme-is-fastest-100-most-popular-shopify-themes-ran...

[MPI_themes]

@Kat-EcomExperts thank you for your work.

But what is the main idea of your tool? Why it is better than Google Page Speed, powered by Lighthouse?

For example Avon

98 (not 99) by your tool - https://take.ms/sNKRM

83 - home page by Google - https://take.ms/FAioS

74 - product page by Google - https://take.ms/RD19Z

84 - collection page by Google - https://take.ms/dfPys

What formula did you use to convert 83, 74, and 84 to 98?

Does your tool consider the store features and content per page? If you take the Shella demo with a similar configuration you will get the 99 points - https://take.ms/hbnJw

That is much closer to the Google score - https://take.ms/wZsNC

[davidkean]

@Kat-EcomExperts could you share how your tool calculator the score? Please refer to this share from Google Pagespeed Insights https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/scorecalc/#FCP=2175&SI=3105&LCP=2520&TTI=5140&TBT=203&CLS=....

@MPI_themes: please don't build a private store ( https://shella-fashion.myshopify.com ) that is only used to promote the performance. I see the store you are using to promote the performance score has so little content on the homepage. Just some banners and collection images, a simple menu ( not the mega menu ), even there is not basic Shopify apps that are installed on this store. Please show the performance score of your home style demo stores because these are the package theme customers receive when they buy your theme. This is the result when I test one of your home style demo stores with Google Pagespeed Insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en&url=https%3A%2F%2Fshella-demo.myshopif....

[MPI_themes]

@davidkean thank you.

The Shella main demo is overloaded with content and enabled features. You hardly can find the theme with the same amount of content and features as at the Shella main demo store.

I will optimize the main demo, move some features to other demos.

Please note, both demos http://shella-demo.myshopify.com/ and https://shella-fashion.myshopify.com/ use the same theme version. The difference is only in content, theme configuration, store configuration, and apps.

It depends on the store owner's needs how to configure the Shella theme. To get better speed stats or to get sales converting features

[DariusWS]

Everybody is promoting their themes... People need something in the middle between performance and features. We need features in themes, but it shouldn't cost lower performance in shop. Google changes coming in May and every competitive shop wants to perform as well as can. Comparing themes I think it should be compared not only the main page but product and collection page too. Because just like https://bt-vodoma-2.myshopify.com/products/moonlight-shirt-bay have an amazing fast main page, a lot of features, but product pages (google: ~50) and LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) not so well.

Some theme developers use gulp to help shop owner developers to choose and combine whatever they need in js. So it is possible to have a lighter js file. I think it is good practice.

Another problem I got is keeping the theme up-to-date with all customization I need. It takes too much time. Does any theme creator share changelog in github? It would be a great solution, then compare a file to file.

At the moment looking for migration and priority speed then features in the theme.

[davidkean]

Hello @DariusWS 

Thank you for sharing what you need for a real Shopify store. I agree with you that speed is important, but keeping it good in a store with lots of features is even more important. For your example: I also tested this page https://bt-vodoma-2.myshopify.com/products/moonlight-shirt-bay with Google Pagespeed Insights, the score is 69 on mobile, 97 on desktop, screenshots https://tppr.me/CD4x1, https://tppr.me/3YtH. A score of 50 in your test result may be the lowest score, not average. By default, Shopify loads so many scripts on the product page, so 50 is also the possible best score. You can test any other themes to verify that.

For the changelog to compare a file to file, Vodoma, Beloria, and Woodstock also provide the .diff files in each version. You just go to https://diffy.org, upload a .diff file of the theme package you want to compare, you will see all changed files and the changed codes in each file. Please refer to the screenshot https://tppr.me/LQppF.

If people ensure that all their ads are true, then they have permission to do that because they must work very hard to create high-quality themes.

[KMPower]

Hi David, I sent a message off your website a few hours ago.

Our current site www.truorganicbeef.com  uses the Venue Theme by Shopify which is just painfully slow and hurting our Google rankings for sure. We want to make a change...and have a few important questions I hope you don't mind answering

1. OK to use our own desired fonts on your themes?  We use 3 Google fonts currently 

2. Can we customize the tops and bottoms of Collection pages with text/images? In our case we have intro blurb ( for SEO keywords) and bottom of pages, I just want to see if it is possible?

3.  We carry quite a few informational pages (non-product pages) about our Food/Farm Standards.  Between Vedoma and Beloria , which is more suitable to include such informational pages ? these are text and images eg this page .....https://truorganicbeef.com/pages/trubeef-is-carbon-neutral-regenerative-beef

4. Theme Load Speeds - am I right in saying Vedoma and Beloria are about the same ie quick 🙂 May I ask you, when your theme(s) get downloaded onto the Shopify platform, what kind of speed scores could we reasonably expect on D/top and Mobile? 

5.  On Vedoma and Beloria - is the logo size editable or is this preset and not adjustable? 

6. Your Pop Ups  - can we set this to our desired time to pop up eg after 45 seconds and also choose which pages to appear on? 

7. On Theme Homepage Hero Image  - can this be set as an auto carousel ( with timer)  or is it a manual click and scroll type? 

8.Based on our current website , nr of sku's 35-40 which of your Themes would you suggest yourself based on your experience?   

9. Apps - are the following compatible with Beloria and Vedoma...? Bold Subscriptions - we sell mostly on subscription , judge.me for reviews  , provesource ( social proofing)  , tawk ( chat) 

10. A Dumb Question on Images - I note on all your Demo's , the product images are  Portrait...... we use Square and Landscape and want to avoid reshooting images. I take it your Themes work to any size or is the portrait style preset?  Sorry - a dumb question but want to be sure beforehand.

 I would really really appreciate your feedback and guidance David. Well done on your work by the way on, the standard features  are really  good  

Thank You in advance David

Ken

[Beacon]

Hi @KMPower 

Did David respond to your message through the website? I am also interested in the answers to your questions. What theme did you end up going with? 

[Andrew41]

@MPI_themes 
I can help since I'm on Kat's team and I build the thing. Yes it's powered by Lighthouse And GTmetrix

The score on www.testmystorespeed.com is an weighted average of the following elements:
- Home, Product, Collection Desktop
- Home, Product, Collection Mobile (20% more important)

The tool is a work in progress (it's free after all) but it aims to give better feedback and a more complete picture vs just a 1 page very technical report from Google page speed

We obviously welcome feedback! Hope this helps.

Cheers
Andrew

[davidkean]

Hi all,

I am offering a free trial to use my high-performance Shopify themes. Just go to https://toolkit.boostheme.com/installation to install the Boostheme Toolkit app on your store. From this app, you can install trial premium themes to see how they will look in your store, with your products, brand colors, and style, before you decided to buy them. My themes have been optimized performance very well. Beloria and Vodoma have been updated to be compatible with Shopify Online store 2.0. You can refer to the result from Google Pagespeed Insights https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbt-beloria-1.myshopi..., or GTMetrix https://gtmetrix.com/reports/bt-beloria-1.myshopify.com/52JGI1Qy/, and Webpagetest https://www.webpagetest.org/result/210708_BiDc79_2ab6be672e44554d257b9f0cfb8adc8f/. And the score in Shopify Online store:

[Baldur_Helgason]

@MPI_themes I’m really interested in the Shella theme. Can you provide some examples of actual real life use cases of this theme?

[MPI_themes]

@Baldur_Helgason  thank you for your interest in the Shella Shopify theme

You may get all details about it at https://themeforest.net/item/shella-ultimate-fashion-responsive-shopify-theme/22804833 page

It includes the list of stores based on the Shella theme - https://take.ms/RpUge Please note, the page speed depends on apps added to the store, we continuously improve the theme, the store may have the old theme version without the latest performance updates.

[davidkean]

Hi @kprimdal,

I'm David from Boostheme team.

One of my themes you have used to test the Pagespeed score is Beloria. The Pagespeed score of our theme in your list is not correct. Beloria's Pagepseed score is now 92 on mobile, 95 on desktop. You can check the result at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en&url=https%3A%2F%2Fbt-beloria-1.myshopi.... I have also developed other fastest Shopify themes such as Vodoma, Woodstock, and Shopcast. All of them have a high Pagespeed score. Even the score is also very good if you test my themes with GTMetrix, Pingdom, Webpagetest, or any other tools. This is the Pagespeed result of Vodoma (92 on mobile and 97 on desktop).

Note: this is the Pagespeed score when my themes have been added lots of features such as megamenu, currency converter, slider, Product Reviews app, free shipping bar, featured blog slider, countdown timer, progressive web app, quick view popup, add to cart popup and upsell products,... The homepage's content also contains at least 3 banner blocks, 2 product tab blocks ( each tab is a slider of products ). Air Theme One does not have all these features, even the basic app like as Product Review app is not also installed on the demo store of this theme, so this theme should not be listed in your list.

[Jessy-clothes]

Hi,

I re-do the test using the same demos & using Google speed insight + Gtmetrix and here are the results I got :

Note : I used only the first 8 themes in your list, the other ones are not fast at all

Gtmetrix score

	Theme	Demo	Gtmetrix (Pagespeed)	Gtmetrix (Yslow)
1	Plak	https://plak-themev1-demo-store.myshopify.com/	99	98
2	Beloria	https://bt-beloria-1.myshopify.com/	98	92
3	Air Theme One	https://primdelux.ph/	97	95
4	Debut	https://debut-theme-default.myshopify.com/	95	95
5	Brooklyn	https://brooklyn-theme-classic.myshopify.com/	95	79
6	Shella	https://shella-demo.myshopify.com/	92	80
7	Booster	https://booster-theme-jewelry.myshopify.com/	87	92
8	Ella	https://new-ella.myshopify.com/?fts=0	86	84

Google speed score (mobile)

	Theme	Demo	Google speed score
1	Air Theme One	https://primdelux.ph/	94
2	Beloria	https://bt-beloria-1.myshopify.com/	91
3	Plak	https://plak-themev1-demo-store.myshopify.com/	79
4	Debut	https://debut-theme-default.myshopify.com/	78
5	Booster	https://booster-theme-jewelry.myshopify.com/	69
6	Brooklyn	https://brooklyn-theme-classic.myshopify.com/	56
7	Ella	https://new-ella.myshopify.com/?fts=0	55
8	Shella	https://shella-demo.myshopify.com/	34

[davidkean]

@kprimdal It seems there is one confusion here. I didn't improve anything about Pagespeed in our themes after I see this topic because all of my themes have always been optimized for performance carefully before release, so I don't need to do anything to improve the PageSpeed score of my themes. You can view the changelog of Beloria at https://beloria-docs.boostheme.com/change-log.

@Jessy-clothes Special thanks for your ranking tables.

[Baldur_Helgason]

Very helpful list once I redesign my store! Thanks 😄

However, I would rather rank the pages for their collection page or article page score since those are the pages that will most likely rank on Google (at least for me)

We’re using the minimal theme and it’s pretty fast https://minimal-fashion.myshopify.com/

66/96 front page

74/94 collection

58/93 product

65/95 article

Our page (with additional apps etc):

64/98 front page

64/99 collection

55/87 product

70/97 article

[kprimdal]

@Baldur_Helgason 

I have just done a new test using the collections pages

Google speed score (mobile)

	Theme	Demo	Google speed score
1	Air Theme One	https://primdelux.ph/collections/all	93
2	Debut	https://debut-theme-default.myshopify.com/collections/all	83
3	Beloria	https://bt-beloria-1.myshopify.com/collections/all	79
4	Booster	https://booster-theme-jewelry.myshopify.com/collections/all	76
5	Brooklyn	https://brooklyn-theme-classic.myshopify.com/collections/all	75
6	Plak	https://plak-themev1-demo-store.myshopify.com/collections/all	74
7	Ella	https://new-ella.myshopify.com/collections/all	42
8	Shella	https://shella-demo.myshopify.com/collections/all	29

I have tested each site multiple times and taken the best score.

[smartphonewidge]

You can't compare the speed of your theme Air Theme One with the other ones, especially with Plak and Beloria.

Your theme Air Theme One is empty, the collection page doesn't have :

- sidebar filter with color swatches
- currency converter
- quickview button
- video ( like the one on plak theme)
- megamenu 
- free shipping bar
- ....

You should only compare themes which have almost the same features.

From what i can see, Beloria & Plak are the fastest shopify themes and this is the right answer to your question, when you add lot of features to your theme, then comeback to compare.

kind regards,

[theteebro]

Just wanted to reply to this since I can't leave a review on Google or the website.  Air Theme One is just flat out awesome!  We went from a google speed score of 9 - 11 to 75-89 just by changing to this theme.  I won't mention the old themes, but will say we've spend a good bit of money buying themes and apps to try to boost mobile speed over the past year (95% of our traffic is mobile) and this theme is absolutely crushing it!  Very happy and can't wait to see how this theme helps us grow!

https://TheTeeBro.com

Dave Miller, Owner.

[Jessy-clothes]

Even if i don't like themes from theme forest, I do like Beloria, very fast and full of features, and the one I like the most and which i'm using is Plak, very very fast too and full of features that helped me increase my conversion rate, your site looks good but as soon as you add feature the speed will go down, i suggest you to either chose beloria or plak, moreover with plak you will get free support which i don't know if it is the case on themeforest, but anyway, i'm now more focused on marketing, blogging to drive more sales

[hashiromer]

I don't see the point of fastest theme, the fastest theme would be the theme with least features, imo we should look for themes which achieve the best trade-off with speed and features.

Also,  web performance testing tools like Page Speed Insights measure the extent to which our website's performance can be improved "keeping the same content". Comparing the speed of webpages with different content is comparing apples and oranges in my opinion.

[oreoorbitz]

A theme can be made to perform very well and be feature rich if it's built with performance in mind.

For instance,  a product page using Slick js will perform worse then one using with swiper js or glide js. I've seen themes use moment js even though they're just using a single function. Lodash, jquery, and handlebars js and other libraries are totally unneeded to build a feature rich theme. 

Or a theme that using dynamic module imports for its Javascript will have alot less javscript on a page then a theme that just bundles everything.

You could also use a css loader script to conditionally load css based off the html on the page, and use critical css to avoid FOUC.

Also almost every theme I've worked on doesn't come with preload hints for largest content, though alot of it is conditional, there alot instances where you can be confident they would be useful.

I haven't seen themes use Facades for youtube/vimeo videos.

And for sections that are DOM heavy, like sliders, you can lazy render the off screen slider Nodes. 

[hashiromer]

I am comparing performant themes, that means themes which utilize all of the techniques you described and more.

Between them, the fastest theme will be one implementing least features.

[DariusWS]

@hashiromer so you mean merchant should by themes without any comparing? Every theme creator says they have Speed optimized theme but it is far from true. Some of them have no features that's why they theme fast. It is quite complicated to select the right theme. We selected https://shella-demo.myshopify.com/ feature-rich and really speed optimized compared to empty https://airthemeone.com/ or slow Ella or Turbo(expensive and slow)

[oreoorbitz]

Using Shella theme as an example of what I mentioned in my previous post of all the improvements  that can be made and still keep things feature rich.

The theme has optimization, like non render blocking resources, but there are areas that could be improved without changing functionality. 

For instance, on their product page, they're using slick slider, which is the slowest slider plugin, see my post here.

https://community.shopify.com/c/Online-Store-Speed/Study-Don-t-use-slick-slide/m-p/1010942#M840

And they don't really need to use Jquery at all.

[MPI_themes]

@DariusWS 

Correct.

At Shella theme we tested Home, Collection, and Product pages.
For the product, we completely rewrite the product gallery.
We used the dynamic JavaScript loader.
If you disable the feature, the JS code doesn't load for it.

We don't include the diff file in the theme package.
You may request it at our support system.

@hashiromer 

Agreed. With one exception.
The theme should properly manage the selected content and features.

For example. SVG icon.
The theme should load one SVG file with code for one icon only.
Some themes still combine hundreds of icons in icon font and loaded it for one or two icons on the page.

The Google Page Speed tools are useful to identify such old-school themes.

Another example, the dynamic JavaScript loader. Very few themes use this approach.

@oreoorbitz 

Thank you for your slider comparison.
I will discuss it with our developer.

You are right, with ES6 the jQuery is not actual anymore.
Remove jQuery will be our next performance improvement.