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 (96% good LCP), 99.9% serve Brotli (96% good LCP), 68.7% serve Zstandard (95% good LCP), and the 95.5% adopting Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) reach 96% good LCP (1.3s median).

Field data PhoneDesktopAll Scope All sites October 2026 edition · All devices 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 96% of those sites have a good LCP, against 96% of all Shopify sites.

The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 8,062 with all devices 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: 96%, against 96% of all Shopify sites. Sites with Zstandard (zstd) compression subresource compression have it least often, at 95%.

SitesGood, needs improvement, poor LCPMedian
All Shopify sites8,06296%1.3s
Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) 95.5%7,70396%1.3s
Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) 99.9%8,05896%1.3s
Unencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) 100.0%8,06296%1.3s
Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) 99.7%8,04496%1.3s
Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd) 68.7%5,55595%1.4s
GoodNeeds improvementPoorSites: with Chrome field data
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 8,062 with all devices 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 · 8,062 with all devices 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: 586 ms median for Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) against 617 ms for Zstandard (zstd) compression. Overall median field LCP is 1.3s for Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) (TTFB 388 ms, load delay 586 ms, load duration 209 ms, render delay 298 ms) versus 1.4s for Zstandard (zstd) compression.

Median LCP phase breakdown (Chrome field p75) Load delay Median LCP
All Shopify sites 6,992389 ms589 ms208 ms298 ms589 mslab 589 ms1.3s
Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) 6,677388 ms586 ms209 ms298 ms586 mslab 586 ms1.3s
Brotli (Content-Encoding: br) 6,990389 ms589 ms208 ms298 ms589 mslab 589 ms1.3s
Gzip (Content-Encoding: gzip) 6,981389 ms589 ms208 ms298 ms589 mslab 589 ms1.3s
Unencoded binary assets (images / WOFF2) 6,992389 ms589 ms208 ms298 ms589 mslab 589 ms1.3s
Zstandard (Content-Encoding: zstd) 4,868399 ms617 ms207 ms318 ms617 mslab 617 ms1.4s
TTFB Resource load delay Resource load time Element render delay
The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 8,062 with all devices 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 95% of Vue sites have a good LCP, against 96% of all sites. jQuery sets the subresource HTTP compression to unencoded binary assets on 100% of its sites, and 94% 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%96%
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%95%
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%94%
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 · 8,062 with all devices 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, 94% of sites with Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) subresource HTTP compression have a good LCP, against 94% 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, 96% of sites with Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (dcb) subresource HTTP compression have a good LCP, against 95% 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 (96% good LCP, 1.3s median), 99.9% use Brotli (96% good LCP), 68.7% include Zstandard responses (95% 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 96% good LCP (1.3s median).

The State of Web Vitals · October 2026 · Shopify: 8,246 crawled sites · 8,062 with all devices 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 (96% good LCP) and 95.5% serve Dictionary-Compressed Brotli (96% 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 · 8,062 with all devices 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 (8,062 with all devices Chrome field data, October 2026) · How we measured