How many times have you left a particular website while shopping and gone for another site due to slow page loading time?
This is no surprise as customers face this every day even with their favorite brands.
💡 We meticulously evaluate Shopify themes and apps based on our hands-on experience. Read more about our comprehensive review process and methodology.
In most cases, new brands tend to ignore the importance of having a quick loading time, and this is because they don’t have the necessary understanding of SEO and how page speed affects the overall performance of an online store.
Providing your customers with a seamless shopping experience essentially relies on whether they are able to access your online store in the first place and make purchases without having to wait long.
That’s why we decided to help you out by helping you choose the fastest Shopify theme for your store. In this blog, we are going to talk about the twelve fastest Shopify themes that will help you keep your customers and increase your sales over the roof! So, let’s begin.
Why Is Website Speed Crucial for Online Sales?
Site speed has the power to influence your conversions, search engine rankings, and customers. A good site speed gives your website a competitive edge over many other advantages it comes with. Here are a few reasons why site speed cannot be overlooked at:
Conversion rates
A fast loading time substantially increases conversion rates as users tend to stay and shop on a quick-loading site. Even a few milliseconds of improvement in site speed can impact your conversion rate positively.
And this gets even more important with mobile shoppers. The number of mobile eCommerce shoppers is climbing up, and a slow website is the last thing they want to encounter while shopping. Don’t believe us?
According to Google, a one-second site speed improvement has the potential to increase conversions for mobile users by 27%. Site speed improvement is necessary for conversion rate optimization.
User experience
The speed of your website is directly linked to user experience. Users don't want to wait more than a few seconds for the website to load, as online shopping aims to provide customers with an easy and convenient shopping experience from home. A slow site speed can lead to frustration amongst users, which might lead them to go to a competitor's website.
Bounce rate
The bounce rate is basically the percentage of users who have left your website after viewing a single page. A high bounce rate clearly indicates that your website is underperforming. A slow website is one of the main reasons for a high bounce rate, as users tend to leave the website because the slow speed obstructs them from getting a seamless shopping experience.
Google search engine rankings
Apart from improving user experience, site speed plays a critical role in ranking your eCommerce website. A slow website negatively impacts your SEO efforts which in turn would affect your online visibility by bringing down your Google search ranks. The better your search engine rank is, the more likely your brand is to get discovered by prospects. A high-speed loading time can also increase your organic traffic and, ultimately, your sales.
Repeat customers
As an online store owner, you probably would have heard about how it is cheaper to keep repeat customers than acquire new ones. Repeat customers are essential for the long-term success of your online store. This means slow site speed over a long time will make it hard for existing customers to continue using your store for their purchase needs. A fast website speed will reduce customer acquisition costs and help you invest more in SEO tools and quality themes.
What Makes Shopify Themes Fast?
Fast themes are associated with less coding and are lightweight, which means they have simple CSS. To ensure Shopify themes are quick and fast to load, there are a few things Shopify provides with its themes:
- To ensure online merchants have a straightforward process in creating and designing their websites, most Shopify themes minimize coding requirements. The lesser the code, the faster it loads.
- Cleaner CSS, which simply means the visitor's browser will have to download fewer CSS files, making it load faster.
- Shopify themes do not rely on outdated JavaScript libraries that slow down websites.
- Shopify 2.0 keeps your store up-to-date with the latest updates. If you are on the old theme architecture, moving to the Online Store 2.0 is almost essential, as older or vintage themes do not get any more updates apart from security fixes in this case you should choose Shopify 2.0 Themes for your store.
Now we know that Shopify themes are designed to be fast and optimized for eCommerce stores. But, not all themes available at the Shopify Themes store will have the same features. But don't worry; this blog will cover some of the fastest Shopify themes, so you don't have to go searching, saving you a lot of time.
5 Factors That Affect Website Speed
Here are some of the most important and common factors that can affect your website's speed:
Hosting
The quality of your web hosting provider is a critical factor you cannot ignore. A good hosting provider keeps your website running fast and smooth, and a poor one is slow and unreliable.
Image size and optimization
As an online store owner, you would want to attract visitors and potential customers to your website with high-quality images and content. But large unoptimized images can slow down your website's loading times significantly. So, consider compressing your images and optimizing them for the web.
Code quality
As we discussed above, clean and optimized coding will keep your website up and running without any delay. Poorly written code will bloat your website's loading time, losing you potential customers and sales.
Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN distributes your website content across multiple serves globally. Now, this helps improve your website speed as users can access your website from different regions faster and without facing any delay.
Paying attention to these factors while building your online store will keep your site speed fast and provide your customers with a better experience. For more details, check out our guide on how to choose a Shopify theme.
9 Fastest Shopify Themes eCommerce Stores You Need to Check out in 2024
To save you time, we decided to try and test some of the best Shopify themes and found nine of the fastest Shopify themes that you can consider for your online store. We have leveraged Google Pagespeed insights to better under page load speed and time. So let’s start.
1. Blum
Blum is rather a new entry to the Shopify themes, and as their USP says, it comes with high page speed. It directly targets fashion brands with its rich image display options and elegant yet quirky styles. It is created by the SalesHunterThemes, and they are not new to the field of designing since they have been working with PageFly to develop Shopify themes.
With a mobile-first design approach, it will keep your conversion rates from falling, no matter what device the visitor is using to shop. True to its word, the Blum theme had an exceptional Google Pagespeed score, and we are going to talk about it in detail below. Since the theme prioritizes speed, the customer experience will be top-of-the-line.
The numerous features and custom capabilities offered by the Blum theme ensure that you are able to design your website effortlessly, and your customers will have a smooth experience, right from finding the products they want to check out.
If you have a fashion, health, or beauty brand, then this theme could be the one for you. Why? The design is clean, and modern and relies on high-quality images and other content to keep your customers hooked. Plus, you don’t have to worry about a high bounce rate or poor ranking because of the fast site speed.
Key highlights of the Blum theme:
- Visual storytelling with features like collapsible content, featured product carousel, etc.
- Mobile responsive and, at the same time, image focused with plenty of options to customize your store with compressed high-quality images that don’t reduce your page loading time.
- Optimized and lesser code weight.
- Lazy loading for quick page loading.
- 4 different styles: Solie, Mondo, Celia, Crafts.
- Intuitive user interface and is extremely SEO-friendly.
We ran Mondo style’s demo page on Google Pagespeed to understand the high page speed they promise. The home page performance on the desktop is exceptionally fast, whereas the performance on mobile is not as good as the desktop performance, but it is still good, with a fast page loading time.
Pricing: The Blum theme is priced at $170 with an unlimited free trial.
Want to learn more about the Blum theme? Check out our detailed review blog here → Blum Shopify theme review.
2. Electro
Electro is a dynamic Shopify theme designed specifically for online stores with a focus on technology, gadgets, and audio products. Created by the SalesHunterThemes, Electro stands out with its comprehensive features tailored to enhance user experience and drive conversions.
With a strong emphasis on functionality and speed, Electro ensures your store’s performance is top-notch across all devices. Its sleek design and powerful features make it an ideal choice for stores looking to showcase tech products, ensuring customers have an engaging and seamless shopping experience.
Electro's key selling points include its versatility in displaying product information through various forms such as text hotspots, collapsible content, and product comparisons. It also boasts conversion-oriented features like the quick buy button, sticky purchasing bar, and cart drawer, all designed to streamline the shopping process and reduce cart abandonment.
Key highlights of the Electro theme
- Diverse Product Display Options: Utilize text hotspots, collapsible content, and product comparison to showcase product details effectively.
- Conversion-Focused Features: Includes a quick buy button, sticky purchasing bar, and cart drawer for a seamless shopping experience.
- Fast Loading Speed: Optimized for performance with high PageSpeed scores on both mobile and desktop, ensuring a smooth browsing experience.
- Mobile-First Design: Prioritizes mobile usability to maintain high conversion rates across all devices.
- Intuitive Design and Customization: Offers easy customization options and a user-friendly interface, enhancing both store aesthetics and functionality.
Additionally, Electro is optimized for speed with impressive Google PageSpeed scores. For instance, the Audio style achieves a mobile score of 91 and 99 scores for the desktop view.
Page speed insights: Mobile
Page speed insights: Desktop
We tested the Audio style demo page on Google PageSpeed to verify the high speed Electro promises. The desktop performance is exceptionally fast, while the mobile performance is also strong, ensuring a quick page load time across all devices.
Pricing: The Electro theme is priced at $170 with an unlimited free trial.
Want to learn more about the Electro theme? Check out our detailed review blog here → Electro Theme
3. Turbo
The Turbo theme is a highly-customizable Shopify theme that is most suited for large eCommerce stores or high-volume stores. It is perfect for brands that are selling both online and offline and would like to provide their customers with the options of both. It supports visual storytelling like all the best Shopify themes and comes with speed, style, and flexibility.
Created by Out of the Sandbox, the Turbo theme comes with two options - Sport and Ludicrous, which you can find in the theme editor. The Sport mode comes with seamless integrations with apps, minified CSS, HTML, and much more. Basically, everything you need to run the store the way you want. The Ludicrous option comes with smart features, such as smart page preloading by predicting user behavior. However, it doesn’t work with third-party apps that easily, and hence some users opt for the Sport.
Key highlights of the Turbo theme:
- It is perfect for Shopify Plus merchants.
- Comes with high-demand functionality, high-speed performance, and rich design flexibility.
- Comes in six different styles - Portland, Seoul, Florence, Chicago, Dubai, and Tennessee.
- Lazy loading with optimized and compressed image-focused design.
- Smart page reloading.
- Full CSS customization to achieve the best theme speed results.
- Predictive smart search.
While the site speed and performance are not up to the mark on mobile devices, the desktop performance is exemplary, with above-average performance and site speed. The minified HTML, smart page reloading that predicts user journey to reduce loading time, along with all the other features such as quick navigation, and interactive mini cart, all contribute to the optimal performance of the Turbo theme.
Pricing: The turbo theme is priced at $425.
Check out our detailed review on Turbo theme here → Shopify Turbo theme review.
4. Booster
Another fast and proactive theme we have on the list is Booster. With zero dependencies on
any external apps, the Booster theme is optimized for the best speed and performance delivery. This means there is no modification needed from your end at any point to keep your site speed up.
This is one of the fastest Shopify themes, as the Booster theme uses CSS to trigger the interactions (and most of the time without any Javascript). The modular Javascript loads what is needed preventing any bloat. It is a high-converting theme with sales-enabled features such as sales increase, HP featured product, etc.
Key highlights of the Booster theme:
- Geo-personalized tags, blocks, and events to use visitors’ info in texts and scripts.
- Fully mobile optimized for the best buying experience.
- Customizable cart page.
- Lazy loading for quick and smooth site loading.
- Image auto optimizer.
- Saves money on third-party apps.
We tested one of the demo sites of the Booster theme, and the results are exceptional on both mobile and desktop. The speed index on the desktop is the highest compared to mobile, and yet both shows have a high-speed index compared to many themes.
Pricing: The Booster theme is priced at $248/year or $298 for a lifetime.
5. Shella
Shella is a fast, versatile, and reactive Shopify theme that comes with a reasonable price tag. Although it primarily targets fashion websites, including clothing, shoes, and accessories, it is also suitable for other forms of eCommerce. It comes with 18 skins and layouts that are continuously updated with the latest stylistic and developer trends.
Key highlights of the Shella theme:
- SEO-friendly design.
- Mobile-responsive and mobile-optimized.
- Quick view and lookbook feature.
- Custom product tabs.
- Full-screen slider layouts.
The desktop performance of the Shella theme is outstanding, with optimal site speed and performance. The mobile performance needs some improvement, especially with SEO, which can help your online store rank and improve site speed.
Pricing: The fastest Shopify theme that is also extremely reasonable is the Shella theme. It is priced at $69 for a regular license.
6. Shoptimized
Looking for a fast theme that is also high-converting? Then Shoptimized could be a good choice! With 30+ in-built conversion boosting features, you can avoid using any third-party apps for your sales needs, which often tends to slow down your website, affecting your user’s experience. The theme is extremely fast and mobile-optimized to ensure the performance remains top-notch no matter what device the visitor or customer is using.
With the simple customization tool, you can personalize and design your store without any coding skills. All these conversions and speed-focused features are present because it is created by Bradley Long, a conversion rate expert.
Key highlights of the Shoptimized theme:
- With its awesome conversion-boosting tools, you can save money on external apps.
- Truly mobile-first for the best mobile user experience ever.
- SEO optimized out-of-the-box for the best Pagespeed Insights score. It is also optimized for 200+ ranking factors.
- A dedicated support team is available 24/7.
The Pagespeed insights for the demo site of Shoptimized were quite contrary to what they claimed. The theme had a decent performance and good site speed on decent and an average performance and poor site speed on mobile devices. However, this could be due to any temporary update going on. When we tried to access the demo store, it loaded in under one second without any delay. So, this can definitely be considered one of the fastest Shopify themes. Here’s a glimpse of the site speed:
Pricing: It is priced at $299 for lifetime access.
7. Flex
Another Shopify fast theme by Out of the Sandbox is the Flex theme. As the name suggests, it is an incredibly flexible theme with tons of customization that one can do without affecting page speed. The flexible layouts and custom CSS editing option will help you fully customize your website while adhering to the rigid optimization standards.
It comes with 13 unique style variants to customize and control the way your storefront looks and feels. The theme is suited for entrepreneurs as well as small business owners who are looking to create a stunning online store with maximum focus on their products.
Key highlights of the Flex theme:
- Numerous customization options and endless configurations.
- 13 pre-designed demo stores and three product page layouts.
- Flexible layouts and advanced custom CSS.
- Mega menus and drop-downs for easy navigation.
We tested the style Nourish to understand the site speed and overall performance of the theme. As you can see, the overall performance and speed on the desktop are pretty good, whereas, on mobile, it is subpar. After testing a few more styles, we understand that the Flex theme showcases exceptional performance on the desktop website and is above average for the mobile website.
Pricing: The Flex theme is priced at $495.
8. Dawn
Looking for something chic? Dawn, it is! Great for beginners and small business owners who are looking to start with a free theme that comes with good features and, of course, fast loading time. It is a minimalistic theme, and the center of attraction is the images. Let’s say you are a clothing store; your store’s main attraction will be high-quality product imagery. But doesn’t that slow down the website? Not necessarily. Dawn is one of the best Shopify themes for clothing stores because it combines stunning visuals with optimized performance.
It comes with a few speed optimization features as default. The Dawn theme comes with minified CSS and Javascript and lazy loading. Since it is created and updated by Shopify, you can always expect the best speed optimizations and updates. In a few cases, it has outperformed some of the best Shopify themes, so you know this theme could simply be one of the fastest free Shopify themes
Key highlights of the Dawn theme:
- Minimalistic and sleek design.
- Media-forward product pages to help your customers get a closer look at the products and make an informed buying decision.
- Flexible design and customization options to design without any coding.
- Enhanced search, mega menu, and product filtering and sorting for quick and easy navigation.
- Efficiency CSS.
Both the mobile and desktop performance are over the roof, and as you must have noticed, for many of the themes, the mobile site performance was mediocre. The Dawn theme, however, has excellent site speed in both, making it one of the best choices for fast Shopify themes.
Pricing: It is completely free to use.
Read our complete review on the Shopify Dawn theme here → Dawn Shopify theme review.
9. Split
The Split theme is a great visual storyteller, and if you are a brand looking to take that approach, then this theme is the one for you. With three funky styles - Cuber, Looker, and Jagger, you can design and run an online store in the most modern way. It comes from a trusted developer - Krown themes, and the name comes from the distinctive split-screen layout that has the ability to keep your visitors hooked. With the Split theme, you get an eye-catchy website with optimal performance and quick loading times.
Key highlights of the Split theme:
- Easy to set up with minimal steps to follow.
- Drag and drop functionality.
- Sales-enabled features like flash sales, slide out, and sticky cart.
- Mega menu and product filtering for easy navigation.
- Quick loading due to optimized images.
- Mobile-responsive design for the best shopping experience on mobile devices.
- Compatible with Online Store 2.0.
The site speed as well as the overall performance on the desktop for the Split theme is excellent. On the other hand, mobile device performance needs some improvement. This can be worked upon through SEO-friendly practices.
Pricing: It is priced at $300 with an unlimited free trial.
Take a look at our detailed Split theme review here → Split theme review.
Conclusion
Shopify Themes store has over 100+ free and paid themes to choose from, and it is imperative to choose a theme that doesn’t put user experience in jeopardy. These nine themes can be on the top of your list on your search for the fastest Shopify themes.
Understand your audience to choose a theme that well fits your needs and expectations, and of course, the quick-loading website will push your customers to browse and even make purchases before they change their minds. So get started with Shopify today.
