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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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:
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
@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.myshopify.com%2F&tab=mobile.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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
OK to use our own desired fonts on your themes? We use 3 Google fonts currently
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?
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?
On Vedoma and Beloria - is the logo size editable or is this preset and not adjustable?
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?
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?
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)
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
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.
