January 2025 Theme Vitals update
Welcome to the monthly update! Consider sponsoring this newsletter to support the work behind this project.
The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data for January 2025 is now live on Theme Vitals. In this post, I’ll cover:
- New corporate sponsor
- Change in the data population
- Aggregated theme performance changes
- Most improved themes for web performance
- Highest growth themes in market share
New corporate sponsor
First off, I want to thank our new corporate sponsor, Cronix. Through their support and individual sponsors, I'm able to keep this work alive. Cronix is a full-service ecommerce and digital agency.
You can add your individual support through a paid subscription or through Github or Ko-fi
Change in data population
The total number of Shopify websites included in the data set decreased modestly on mobile by about 1.5%. On desktop however, it increased by 2.8%. CrUX data reflects user behavior which may be the primary reason for changes.
Effortless returned back to the list (was dropped last month), and Pinnacle joined as well. The Label theme was dropped.
Aggregated performance across all themes
Here are the median, min, and max performance numbers on mobile for all the Shopify themes measured on mobile devices:
(For a more accessible version, see it live on the website: Aggregations).
On mobile devices, the median performance marginally got worse for passing all Core Web Vitals (CWV). The minimum for Interaction to Next Paint (INP) dropped by about 4 points.
Similarly, on desktop devices, the median performance marginally got worse for passing all CWV.
Most improved themes
For mobile devices, these themes had the most improvement in passing all Core Web Vitals:
- New Standard
- Release
- Forge
- Sydney
- Avante
For desktop devices, these themes improved the most:
- Minimalista
- Influence
- Stockholm
- Forge
- Avante
Most of the themes on both those lists have a smaller number of origins/market share in the CrUX data set. Thus, some of the improvements may be due to better theme code, but with fewer data points it could also be due to the underlying population of websites changing.
Highest market growth
As a reminder, the market share numbers calculated in Theme Vitals are not the same as number of installs. Here, we’re calculating market share based on the number of origins (websites/domains) in CrUX. CrUX only shares data for websites that reach a certain threshold of popularity. This threshold sometimes changes. To learn more, check out the methodology page for CrUX.
Growth in number of origins
The themes that already have the largest market shares usually have the highest growth in number of origins. Surprisingly, Dawn is not in the top 5 this month. Only Trade and Impact were in the top 5 last month as well:
Mobile
- Trade
- Concept
- Enterprise
- Impact
- Sleek
On desktop, we're back to some of the usual more recent top 5 themes:
Desktop
- Dawn
- Refresh
- Impulse
- Impact
- Empire
Percent growth in origins
Raw growth is interesting but usually focuses too much on the existing themes with high market share. Here, I show which themes are growing the fastest on a percentage basis:
Mobile
Sleek is continuing it's streak from the previous 2 months (41% in Dec and 87% in Nov) - really impressive, continued growth. Only Veena is new to the list this month:
- Sleek (36%)
- Rise (27%)
- Release (19%)
- Concept (17%)
- Veena (15%)
Desktop
- Sleek (40%)
- Rise (35%)
- Exhibit (22%)
- Avante (22%)
- Stockholm (20%)
Closing
The Theme Vitals site and this newsletter are meant to be a helpful resource to the Shopify community. As always, if you have ideas for new features or other improvements, let me know!