The State of Web Vitals

Shopify subresource compression algorithms and the Core Web Vitals

99.7% of audited sites (8,225) serve Gzip-compressed subresources (95% good LCP), 99.9% serve Brotli (95% good LCP), 68.7% serve Zstandard (94% good LCP), and the 95.5% adopting Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) reach 95% good LCP (1.3s median).

Field data PhoneDesktopAll Scope All sites October 2026 edition · Phone field outcomes · Shopify sites only
Shopify Scoped to 8,248 sites out of 203,892 analyzed (cms) Compare with all sites →

95.5% of Shopify sites use Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) subresource HTTP compression, and 95% of those sites have a good LCP, against 95% of all Shopify sites.

The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 5,825 with phone field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
1

LCP pass rate

Sites with Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) subresource HTTP compression have a good LCP most often: 95%, against 95% of all Shopify sites. Sites with Zstandard (zstd) compression subresource compression have it least often, at 94%.

SitesGood, needs improvement, poor LCPMedian
All Shopify sites5,82595%1.4s
Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) 95.5%5,54795%1.3s
Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) 99.9%5,82395%1.4s
Unencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) 100.0%5,82595%1.4s
Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) 99.7%5,81495%1.4s
Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd) 68.7%4,14894%1.4s
GoodNeeds improvementPoorSites: with Chrome field data
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 5,825 with phone field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
2

Subresource HTTP compression usage

Unencoded binary assets is the most used: 100.0% of Shopify sites. Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) is 95.5% of Shopify sites.

Sites using each option (sites can use more than one) 8,246 sites
Unencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) 100.0% Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) 99.9% Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) 99.7% Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) 95.5% Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd) 68.7%
Unencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) 100.0% Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) 99.9% Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) 99.7% Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) 95.5% Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd) 68.7%
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 5,825 with phone field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
3

LCP phase breakdown by subresource compression algorithm

Across the four LCP sub-parts in Chrome's field data, the largest gap between Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) and Zstandard (zstd) compression sits in resource load delay: 587 ms median for Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) against 623 ms for Zstandard (zstd) compression. Overall median field LCP is 1.4s for Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) (TTFB 400 ms, load delay 587 ms, load duration 206 ms, render delay 311 ms) versus 1.4s for Zstandard (zstd) compression.

Median LCP phase breakdown (Chrome field p75) Load delay Median LCP
All Shopify sites 5,048402 ms590 ms206 ms312 ms590 mslab 596 ms1.4s
Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) 4,809400 ms587 ms206 ms311 ms587 mslab 593 ms1.4s
Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) 5,047402 ms590 ms206 ms312 ms590 mslab 596 ms1.4s
Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) 5,041402 ms590 ms206 ms312 ms590 mslab 596 ms1.4s
Unencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) 5,048402 ms590 ms206 ms312 ms590 mslab 596 ms1.4s
Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd) 3,641412 ms623 ms204 ms334 ms623 mslab 626 ms1.4s
TTFB Resource load delay Resource load time Element render delay
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 5,825 with phone field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
4

Subresource HTTP compression per framework

Vue sets the subresource HTTP compression to Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) on 97% of its sites, and 94% of Vue sites have a good LCP, against 95% of all sites. jQuery sets the subresource HTTP compression to unencoded binary assets on 100% of its sites, and 93% of jQuery sites have a good LCP.

FrameworkSubresource HTTP compression on its sitesGood LCP
All Shopify sites 8,246 sitesUnencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) 100%Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) 100%Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) 100%Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) 96%Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd) 69%95%
Vue 933 sitesUnencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) 100%Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) 100%Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) 100%Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) 97%Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd) 76%94%
jQuery 3,153 sitesUnencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) 100%Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) 100%Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) 100%Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) 94%Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd) 78%93%
Unencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd)
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 5,825 with phone field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
5

Subresource compression or the framework

Does the framework explain the subresource HTTP compression difference?

On jQuery, 93% of sites with Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) subresource HTTP compression have a good LCP, against 93% of jQuery sites with unencoded binary assets. Within jQuery, sites with Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) and unencoded binary assets have a good LCP about equally often. On Vue, 95% of sites with Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) subresource HTTP compression have a good LCP, against 94% of Vue sites with unencoded binary assets. Within Vue, sites with Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) and unencoded binary assets have a good LCP about equally often.

Brotli, Zstandard (zstd), and Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) across page subresources

Nearly every page (100.0%) transfers pre-compressed binary formats like WebP, AVIF, and WOFF2 without extra Content-Encoding. For text subresources (JS, CSS, SVG, JSON), 99.7% of sites use Gzip (95% good LCP, 1.4s median), 99.9% use Brotli (95% good LCP), 68.7% include Zstandard responses (94% good LCP, often from Meta/Google third-party scripts), and 95.5% (7,879 sites, led by Shopify/Cloudflare) use shared-dictionary Brotli (dcb) to achieve 95% good LCP (1.3s median).

The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 5,825 with phone field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
6

Understanding subresource compression algorithms

Enable Brotli (br) and Zstandard (zstd) at your CDN edge for all text-based subresources (text/css, application/javascript, image/svg+xml, application/json) to shrink transfer size by 15% to 25% over Gzip. Across all audited sites, 99.9% serve Brotli subresources (95% good LCP) and 95.5% serve Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (95% good LCP).

Go fix it Configure Cloudflare for passing the Core Web Vitals →
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 5,825 with phone field dataBy Arjen Karel · corewebvitals.io/state-of-cwv
Related signals Scripts per page → Stylesheet origin (1P/3P) → DOM depth → Responsive image markup → By Arjen Karel · 8,246 crawled Shopify sites (5,825 with phone Chrome field data, October 2026) · How we measured