Research
May 2026 data · mobile · real Chrome users · HTTP Archive / CrUX Technology Report
Shopify made the average store fast. The biggest stores are another story. In the May 2026 real-user data, 20.7% of all Shopify storefronts fail Google's mobile Core Web Vitals. Restrict the view to stores that rank in the world's Top 100k sites, roughly mid-market and up, and the failure rate is 56.1%. The bigger the store, the more likely it fails.
"Failing" here means the origin does not pass all three Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) at the 75th percentile for real Chrome users on mobile. Counts are origins, distinct store domains, not pages.
| Shopify segment, May 2026 | Origins tested | Failing |
|---|---|---|
| All Shopify stores | 417,508 | 20.7% (86,391 stores) |
| Top 1M sites | 44,905 | 31.7% |
| Top 100k sites | 1,730 | 56.1% |
The headline "Shopify is fast" is true on average and much less true for the stores with the most traffic. The all-stores number is flattered by a long tail of small stores running stock themes, which Shopify's own platform work keeps making faster for free. Among the stores big enough to rank in the Top 100k, a majority still fail.
It looks backwards until you list what a big store carries that a small one doesn't: more apps, each shipping its own JavaScript; more marketing tags and pixels accumulated over years of campaigns; hero video; heavily customized or fully custom themes that opted out of the stock theme's built-in performance work. Shopify can make its own infrastructure and stock themes faster with every release, and it visibly has. What no platform can auto-fix is the weight a merchant's own team and vendors add on top. That residue is exactly what stays behind after the platform-level gains, and it concentrates in the biggest stores because they have the most teams, the most vendors and the longest histories.
| Shopify mobile, % failing | May 2024 | May 2025 | May 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| All stores | 35.8% | 23.9% | 20.7% |
| Top 1M sites | 54.1% | 36.6% | 31.7% |
| Top 100k sites | 78.8% | 63.1% | 56.1% |
Credit where due: the failing share has dropped a lot, and the 2024 to 2025 fall was the big platform-level jump. But the improvement has decelerated to roughly 3 points a year across all stores. The easy gains, the ones a platform can deliver by shipping faster defaults, appear to be mostly banked. What's left is the hard residue described above.
| Platform, May 2026, mobile, all stores | Failing |
|---|---|
| Shopify | 20.7% |
| Magento | 54.5% |
| WooCommerce | 59.9% |
Shopify genuinely is the fast platform. That's what makes the Top 100k number interesting: it isn't a platform problem, it's a what-merchants-build-on-top problem.
All figures come from the HTTP Archive / CrUX Core Web Vitals Technology Report, pulled from its public API at cdn.httparchive.org. No account or key is needed; anyone can reproduce every number on this page. I cross-checked the platform-level figures against the Web Almanac 2025 ecommerce chapter, which reports the same dataset for July 2025, and they match. Two honest notes: the rank-bucket splits (Top 1M, Top 100k) come from that same dataset and no third party publishes them independently, so treat them as single-sourced from the authoritative dataset. And you may see older blog posts claiming around half of all Shopify stores fail; those figures are stale, from the 2022 to 2023 era, and don't match the current data.
You don't need me for this part. Put your store URL into PageSpeed Insights and read the top section, "Discover what your real users are experiencing." That is your CrUX field data, the same source as everything above, and it's what Google actually uses. If all three Core Web Vitals are green at the 75th percentile, you pass. If any of them is amber or red on mobile, you're in the failing share, and the cause is usually findable: apps, tags, video, theme customization, in roughly that order of likelihood.
This gap, the part of store speed that platforms can't auto-fix, is the thing storespeedup measures and fixes by hand. If you'd like the check done for you, the teardown is free and honest: send your store URL and I'll tell you what's slow, why, and whether it's worth fixing at all.
Get a free teardown →Alex · alex@storespeedup.com · storespeedup.com