Optimize Your Store with These Fast-Loading Shopify Themes

At this stage, the theme loads at a decent speed, with LCP scores in the 2 to 3-second range on both desktop and mobile.

If you choose Aurora to power your Shopify store, you’ll enjoy:

• Mega menu & In-menu promos
• Digital lookbook
• Interactive hotspots
• Custom color swatches
• Cross-selling features

6. Sunrise: Fast theme for stores with extensive catalogs

Price: $240

Demo: View Store

Theme URL: Sunrise

As the Sunrise theme shows, you can have a speedy store with an extensive catalog. This simple and efficient theme has a performance score above 80 for both desktop and mobile, which means your website visitors enjoy a smooth, speedy experience regardless of the device they’re on.

Some noteworthy features of the Sunrise theme include:

• Physical store locator
• Product video support
• Product recommendations
• Sidebar menu
• In-store pickups

Sunrise is recommended for ecommerce stores selling across multiple channels.

7. Athens: Fast Shopify theme for extensive product inventories

Price: $300

Demo: View Store

Theme URL: Athens

Available in 7 languages, Athens brings impressive theme customization options and snappy page speeds to merchants with product catalogs numbering in the thousands.

Optimizing page speeds can be a challenge for brands with large catalogs, but Athens provides an excellent Shopify theme foundation for these merchants.

Noteworthy features of this theme include:

• Slide out cart
• Language support for En, Fr, It, Es, De, Du, and Br
• Collection page navigation
• In-menu promos
• Pop-up overlays

Athens will work well for electronics, home decor brands, sports equipment, and other stores that also do in-peron selling.

8. Cascade: Sleek, fast Shopify theme for brand storytelling

Price: $350

Demo: View Store

Theme URL: Cascade

Cascade’s name and design echo the gentle flow of water. It incorporates a distinctive, soothing layout as visitors scroll, making your product selection pleasing to the eye.

Fabulous design isn’t the only thing Cascade has. It achieves an exceptional 97/100 performance on desktop and a solid 71/100 rating on mobile, ensuring you won’t only get a modern-looking theme that looks sleek but delivers an excellent page experience for your customers. Theme developer Switch has also received praise for reliable support, so you’re in safe hands.

Features included in Cascade to help you boost sales include:

• Sticky cart
• Recommended products
• Product reviews
• Slide out cart options
• Promo pop-ups

Cascade is popular among apparel, jewelry, and home decor brands.

9. Publisher: Free, fast-loading Shopify theme for art and music brands

Price: Free

Demo: View Store

URL: Publisher

Testing out a business idea or on a small budget? The Publisher theme is a solid choice to start selling on Shopify. Tests show it loads fast and performs well on desktop and mobile.

Its moody aesthetic is perfect for businesses selling art, music, or books to showcase their product catalogs, sell a single product, or tell a story around their brand.

Publisher includes the following notable features:

• Stock counter
• Sticky header
• Promo banners
• Product recommendations
• Quick buy

Note that this is a newer theme by Shopify, which means you might need to hire a developer to help you with the setup if you struggle to do it on your own.

10. Pursuit: Bold, fast Shopify theme for medium-large merchants

Price: $320

Demo: View Store

Theme URL: Pursuit

Experienced Shopify theme developer Mile High Themes serves up another solid offering with Pursuit. This theme is suited for established merchants with multiple product collections or an extensive product range that can become confusing to navigate without the right product discovery features in place.

Besides a bold theme design and speedy load times, the theme developer supports it well, with an average of 98% positive reviews and multiple reviews praising the quality of customer support provided by the developer.

Some of the key features Pursuit supports include:

• Slide-out cart
• Infinite scroll
• Promo tiles
• In-store pickups
• Collection page navigation

Pursuit is particularly popular among sports equipment and gear brands.

11. Parallax: Stylish and speedy Shopify theme

Price: $240

Demo: View Store

URL: Parallax

Parallax combines style, substance, and speed into a beautiful package. Like its namesake, the theme has a distinctive parallax scrolling effect that adds depth to your visual storytelling and strengthens your website design with a subtle interactive element.

Besides stellar load times, remarkable features of Parallax include:

• Image rollover
• Sticky header
• Slideout cart
• Pre-order functionality
• Promo banners

The theme’s styles are designed with apparel, food & beverage, and sports gear brands in mind.

Tips to design a fast-loading Shopify store

Besides a fast-loading Shopify theme, factors like reducing third-party code and optimizing image sizes keep your store optimized for browsing and conversions. Here are practical tips you can follow to ensure your store provides your visitors with the best possible experience.

Optimize image and video sizes

High-resolution images are essential to present your latest product collection or seasonal sales campaign in the best light. However, they can slow down your site if not optimized properly, especially if you’re selling to audiences without access to a high-speed Internet connection.

Shopify automatically compresses uploaded images. However, it’s worth reviewing the photos you upload to ensure your site loads fast, especially on mobile devices.

Some tips to optimize your images without losing visual quality.

• Follow recommended image sizes when uploading or resizing images
• Use image compression tools like Crush or Logeix to reduce file sizes
• Consider the WebP image format for your website photography assets
• Implement lazy loading, which is waiting to render website content until needed. Many of the fastest-loading Shopify themes support lazy loading or allow you to add a lazy loading script to your store

The same applies to videos. Keep your video resolution to 1080p to balance quality and file size, and remove audio from your video files if it’s unnecessary. You may also consider embedding videos on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia instead of hosting them natively to improve load speeds further.

Evaluate installed third-party apps and customizations

Installing third-party apps is a great way to add functionality to your store. But most apps you install add third-party code that can slow down your site.

Ask yourself these questions to evaluate and streamline your third-party apps.

• How does this app help my store? For example, does it meet a business need or boost sales?
• Is there a theme already including the feature I’m looking for? Or does the latest version of the theme support a desired feature natively?
• Are the customizations I made still needed?
• Are the apps I'm keeping or installing up to date?

Review your store’s hosting plan

The web hosting plan you use for your website contributes to load speed. Suppose you expect a traffic influx from an upcoming seasonal campaign or holiday season. In that case, reviewing your store's hosting plan's allocated capacity is vital to ensure no slowdowns or crashes during these critical sales moments.

If you aren’t on Shopify’s built-in hosting plan and budget allows, choose a dedicated hosting plan or a Virtual Private Server (VPS) plan to increase your website speed. When evaluating hosting plans, look out for their uptime and if they use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to help people access your store from anywhere in the world.

Optimize your Shopify store with a suitable theme

Selecting one of the fastest-loading Shopify themes for your store is one way to set yourself up for success. While any of the themes on this list are a good pick if you want to give your visitors a fast page experience, we know it takes time to make a decision.

Why not go through the list and shortlist three themes based on what’s important to you? Then, install the shortlisted themes in your store to test them.

You can even take it further by adding a few products and uploading some images or videos to get a better sense of how the new theme will look and perform. Shopify offers an unlimited free trial, so take the time you need to find the theme that best suits your business needs.