November 2024 Theme Vitals Update
November data is live now. Find out which Shopify themes improved the most in both Core Web Vitals and market growth. Also learn about new features in the pipeline.
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The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) data for November 2024 is now live, and I’ve updated Theme Vitals to add the new data. In this post, I’ll cover:
- Growth in data population
- Aggregated theme performance improvements
- Newly added and dropped themes
- Most improved themes for web performance
- Highest growth themes in market share
- Query changes now and in the future
- Website and newsletter changes
Growth in data population
The total number of Shopify websites included in the data set increased by 12,066 on mobile (2.3%) and 16,584 on desktop (6.2%) devices.
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 for passing all Core Web Vitals (CWV) improved by 2.3 percentage points (pp). Median LCP improved by 1.2pp, CLS by 0.1pp, and INP by 1.6pp. October also saw increases across the board, so it's encouraging that as a group, Shopify themes are improving.
On desktop devices, improvement was 2.8pp for passing all CWV, 0.8pp for LCP, 2.4pp for CLS, and no change for INP.
Newly added and dropped themes
Area, Release, Drop, Marble, and Forge all reached the minimum threshold of origins (50) and are new to Theme Vitals this month. Drop was actually dropped last month and returned this month. No themes were dropped from the data this month.
Most improved themes in November 2024
For mobile devices, these themes had the most improvement in passing all Core Web Vitals:
- Maker
- Sleek
- Capital
- Shapes
- Sydney
For desktop devices, these themes improved the most:
- Starlite
- Creative
- Express
- Charge
- Mr Parker
Most of the themes on the desktop list 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 in November 2024
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 had the largest market shares also mostly had the highest growth in number of origins:
Mobile
- Dawn
- Craft
- Trade
- Refresh
- Prestige
Refresh is new to the top 5.
Desktop
- Dawn
- Prestige
- Impulse
- Debut
- Refresh
Impulse, Debut, and Refresh are new to the top 5 this month. Sadly, Debut is vintage. The growth may be to new sites being added to the crawl, not necessarily new sites using Debut.
Percent growth in origins
Raw growth is interesting but 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 (87%) wow!
- Rise (30%)
- Concept (27%)
- Veena (27%)
- Digital (23%)
Desktop
- Sleek (73%)
- Rise (41%)
- Exhibit (35%)
- Veena (34%)
- Digital (33%)
I think this is the first time that both mobile and desktop lists contain 4/5 of the same themes.
Query changes now and in the future
Better theme store name matching
As I mentioned last month, we got some new properties in the global Shopify object. Those changes were finally announced in the changelog. Now that window.Shopify.theme.schema_name is available, I've switched my query to use it. This should not have changed the algorithm though as I only use this part of the query to match up the theme_store_id with the appropriate theme name which also helps me populate theme store links. It's really nice not having to filter out "production", "main", and "Updated copy of Updated copy of My store" anymore. :sweat_smile:
Changes to the HTTPArchive data set
HTTPArchive is one of the two key data sets I use. They announced new tables to make it easier to query (yay!) but also announced the deprecation of the old ones (boo!). Luckily, I was able to make the changes this month using the migration guide. Overall, I'm extremely happy about this change despite the unplanned work - it's dropped my query price from about $80 to well within the free tier for BigQuery.
In the pipeline: possible future features
The other new property in the global Shopify object is the theme version number. I've been mulling what to do with this data. Most themes don't have quite enough data to make a breakdown of performance metrics possible, but I'm thinking it might be nice to see a pie chart of which versions are represented in the data. What do you think?
The big feature I'm mulling is adding p75 bins so that you can see the distribution of performance for a theme rather than just the % passing, etc. Then, I could also add a feature to check your site to see how you perform versus the other sites using the same theme. My guess is folks would really like this, but I'd love to hear from you.
Website and newsletter changes
I got some great feedback on the website, and have been working on improving the approachability. Web performance is a highly technical topic, and my engineering brain defaults to fewer explanations. Take a look and let me know what you think. What are some other areas I could make easier to understand?
I've switched the newsletter provider from Substack to Buttondown. The interface should be cleaner and less spammy now. All existing subscribers should be migrated, and I also added the previous posts to the newsletter archive.
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!
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