I needed to find the actual baseline speed of popular Shopify themes. Since dev stores are password-protected, manual PageSpeed Insights URLs don't work.
I wrote a Node.js script using Puppeteer to bypass the storefront password, and hooked it into the Lighthouse CLI to audit 17 themes across mobile and desktop viewports, running 3 passes each to get the median.
It turns out that while Shopify's default free themes are highly optimized, a few premium themes (like Broadcast and Expanse) manage to keep a perfect 100 score even with heavy UI components.
I published my methodology, the full dataset, and the raw JSON reports on my blog. If you do Shopify dev work, you can check the baseline numbers. You check more about the fastest shopify theme here
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