Hi Fellow Shopifiers,
I have been going through various themes listed in https://themes.shopify.com/ and found a few decent ones from a design + look & feel point of view.
However, I am confused on how to assess these themes on the basis of their technical performance such as page load speed.
Is there a way or someone who has tested a few themes and can recommend some?
Any and all help is appreciated
@Ebin ,
Speed of a website is a very important part of business because it affects sales. So it is very important if you choose an optimized theme that increases your website or store speed. In shopify many themes are generally well optimized and no need to do more work for optimization.
There are many themes available in shopify that are well optimized.
You can check there details on google. hope you will find the best theme for your store.
@Ebin the theme doesn’t matter too much for speed - if you’re purchasing a new theme they’re usually pretty well optimized… The main contributors to lag are apps, images, and videos (though you can optimize all of these to an extent).
With any theme you have access to the code so you can optimize it. We’ve optimized 1500+ Shopify stores, if you need help just give a shout at speedboostr.com/contact. Or you can also see our full Shopify optimization guide here if you prefer to do in-house: https://speedboostr.com/shopify-optimization.
You can see how optimized a theme is by running it through the Shopify Analyzer, that’s a performance analysis tool geared specifically for Shopify sites.
We recommend choosing the best theme that fits your vision, then if it’s not well optimized for speed you can improve that later. That being said, we do have some favorites that we’ve used: https://speedboostr.com/shopify-themes-and-developers.
Don’t even bother with it. There are developers on freelance exchanges who, for a small fee of 40-50$, increase the loading speed of any site. It is better to focus on the design of your website.
I will strongly disagree with others here that many themes are well optmized and that the theme speed performance doesn’t matter.
Most people will add a bazillion apps and destroy their speed score, but the theme will still have a signifacant impact.
There are plehnty of themes that with design decissions that are bad for performance.
For instance, shella, last time I worked on it, it hides the page untill all it’s content is loaded, this results in a horrible LCP score, and bad FCP.
I’ve seen certain themes that have a javascript that is 100kb, using none vital libraries like Jquery. I know Turbo theme has a announcment bar feature that is revealed via javascript, resulting in CLS.
Many themes will use JS lazyloading, which is alot worse for LCP then native lazyloading.
The best way to test a theme is to get the preview,setup test images, then run it through pagespeed insights and webpage test. A theme should have a score of 70 or higher on PSI with images added. The best performing themes i’ve worked with personally are the Dawn based themes.
Hello @Ebin ,
It is a good practice to use performance-oriented free themes from the Shopify theme store, compared to paid themes. Even, before selecting a paid theme please look for the performance of demo stores and choose the relevant theme based on performance.
You can refer to the below online Tools for checking the performance of any demo store-
Based on our experience, we recommend you some themes that are useful for your business:
Note: When you install a new theme into a newly created store, it runs smoothly and offers great speed due to the absence of added apps and 3rd party libraries. However, installing additional apps and adding libraries makes it heavier and hence results in poor performance. You need to take corrective measures to avoid performance issues with regular maintenance and speed optimization of your store.
Please connect with us to learn more about site performance and maintenance tips.
All the best,
Team CedCommerce