Fastest E-commerce platform. Let’s try to find it together.

Do you need to choose the fastest e-commerce platform? This is a rhetorical question. We all understand that speed impacts sales, and thus, conversions. In this article, I am going to review some points that affect eCommerce software performance. I am not here to talk about compressing the images to reduce the page weight or something like that. Together we will discuss factors such as hosting and custom templates with optimized code that help to solve speed issues.

By revisiting existing data I was able to gather from my previous posts, I’m ready to define the average product page speed. The results will be based on 72 stores built with 5 top e-commerce platforms. And this will help us to determine the fastest e-commerce platform to sell with. 

Are you willing to try to find the fastest e-commerce platform? Let’s do it together.

What is behind the scenes of the fast performance?

Performance means the speed and responsiveness of the website. Being able to react quickly to users’ requests creates a positive customer experience. The fast website’s load time ensures user satisfaction and high conversion rates. 

It’s estimated that 218.8 million US consumers will shop online in 2023. And this is only in America. To help them get a lasting positive impression, there should be enough e-commerce platforms to provide fast services and the appropriate level of satisfaction.

If you are still in the process of choosing the platform, you can read my story about choices to start selling online. You can also take a look at amazing samples of stores built with the most popular platforms in my opinion:

• What companies use Shopify? You’ll also get stories, apps for stores, and speed scores.
• Discover 14 popular companies using Shopware. Fascinating stories and shops’ speed results are right here.
• Look over the stories, plugins, and page speed results of 14 big companies using WooCommerce.
• Why wait? See 14 BigCommerce website examples with brands’ stories and page speed results.
• Review 15 companies using Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce. Here are stories, modules of sites, and their speed results.    

However, if you have gone further, you should focus on the deeper platform’s characteristics. Today our goal is to identify the factors helping platforms go faster. 

In the background of the platform’s performance is hosting. It can enhance your store’s speed and reliability. Let’s spend some time discussing the difference between types of hosting. 

The effect of hosting on website performance

The web hosting is responsible for handling incoming requests. So, speed matters. The web hosting performance level here depends on how quickly the website files download and then display on the web browser page. Indeed, every single hour of hosting downtime costs money, and therefore you should take the hosting type choice seriously.

Let’s reflect on SaaS and Self-hosted solutions. I will briefly address some of the differences here.

Technical difference 

• A SaaS solution does not require hosting. The SaaS platform owners offer both software and hosting in one single package. The service runs within the provider’s cloud infrastructure. 
• A self-hosted solution must be installed on your own or rented server.

Things you control

• With the SaaS platform, you shouldn’t care independently about hosting, updates, and security patches.
• With self-hosted type, you can autonomously control both backend and frontend software and updates.

Freedom to modify and customize

• SaaS applications have limited customization. The fact is that SaaS providers don’t give access to the source code. They fully control the backend customization. On the other hand, no coding skills are required. You receive an all-in-one solution and there’s no need to dive deep into the development process.
• The self-hosted solution, on the contrary, presents full customization and web design freedom. You will be able to add various plugins thanks to access to the source code. So, if you need to modify software to meet your unique business needs, flexibility in terms of customization matters.

Between what to choose?

Every solution is determined individually. So it is up to you to define what is the most practical choice for your business. However, you would have to receive the opportunity to choose, right? 

Let’s see what e-commerce platform invokes this prerogative.

Magento 

Magento 2 is primarily self-hosted. The platform offers high flexibility and customization levels as it allows you to make any changes to the code. In addition, Magento Commerce has also a cloud-hosted version – Adobe Commerce Cloud. Thus you can choose between SaaS e-commerce corporation and self-hosted solutions.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is an open SaaS platform with Google Cloud infrastructure. That means you don’t have a choice to pick up another hosting type. Still, BigCommerce enables broader customization than other SaaS platforms.

Shopware

The Shopware tool can be used as a SaaS solution or as a self-hosted platform. The second option means you can host your website on your own server, and have enough flexibility to bring to life your exclusive website idea. For instance, here you can find many suitable hosting providers for the Shopware e-commerce platform.

Shopify

Shopify is a SaaS platform that handles web hosting for you. This e-commerce software uses a big network of servers around the world. Many users choose Shopify for its cloud-based approach because in this case, they don’t need to bother about dealing with server upgrades and maintenance.

WooCommerce

To start running e-commerce with the WooCommerce plugin you have to set up your hosting. You have the choice to select different hosting alternatives. And that means you will be responsible for the maintenance, speed, and performance of your store.

Well, choosing the right web host is important as it ensures improved server performance. The last information might have guided you toward an informed choice that fits the specific needs of your e-commerce. The article also reviews the other factors that create the fastest e-commerce platform as well. Keep reading.

High-performance custom themes

What else do experts say? They say the e-commerce platform should be also seen in the context of the availability of custom themes. This is one more way to improve performance.

Here’s more to the website code and website design optimized for speed in the paragraph. 

Many famous themes either for WooCommerce, BigCommerce, or other platforms come overwhelmed with plugins or options for great website functionality. But it often happens that those features include the code that makes your store load slower. Because of this, some providers optimize the code to improve the website’s performance and help your online store run smoothly. And that helps to achieve good page speed scores.

The same is true about the website design, in particular the website template. To make it lighter and faster, it is possible to refine the theme layout or optimize images for page speed. 

And there are “so-called” high-performance custom themes designed to speed up your website. 

What I can say about the availability of themes of that kind for each platform?

Magento

My Magento ideas are based on long-time experience dealing with the platform as a content writer. And I am familiar with many products. For instance, one of the high-performance custom products is Breeze themes. They help users to achieve a 100-page speed score on mobile. Also, analyze Hyva themes. They offer good performance out of the box. In addition, in the article The fastest Magento 2 themes. Test & Compare, I analyzed the fastest and most popular templates for Magento 2. In case you choose the Adobe/Magento software for your business, look through a list of solutions to make store pages run faster.

Shopware

When it comes to Shopware, I found some themes with optimized page load speed. The clean and compatible source code is the basis for this. At least on some template pages, the developers focus on this important point. However, there is another cool thing worth to be outlined here. Since the Shopware 6.5 version from March 2023, all themes support the lazy loading caching technique. This improves the page load speed. So when you stay with Shopware, pay attention to themes available for Shopware 6.5. For example, I could find the Neusicht theme.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce offers over 170 themes, with up to four styling options for the majority of themes. Still, many users hire a developer to improve the page speed for their stores. For instance, when we look at high-performance custom themes such as Cornerstone-Light and Beautify Grocery We can see the mobile performance scores range from 70 to 80. These templates bring a much better result than the other 15 random Bigcommerce themes from the list I’ve tested with Page Speed Insights. There is a logical conclusion I could draw from this – BigCommerce has lots of things to work on in order to position itself under the fastest e-commerce platform name. 

Shopify

There are more than 150 themes in the Shopify Theme Store plus over 1000 Shopify templates are listed on the third-party Theme Forest site. I would pay attention to the Charge theme. This high-performance theme shows a 92 score on the mobile product page. A wonderful choice for your store.

What is the fastest e-commerce platform? Ranked.  

The last paragraph will be given to the summing-up of the results of the average page speed. In my previous articles, I’ve been analyzing the page speed score for stores on various e-commerce platforms. I looked for world-famous brands as well as indie brand websites to monitor the website speed. By that means readers were able to see the mobile performance scores for the homepage, category, and product pages.

We have an understanding of the results for 72 stores built with 5 top e-commerce platforms, for the moment. In the list, you can see the average value of collected performance indicators:

• Bigcommerce – 29.8
• Shopify – 32.6
• Magento 2 – 35.7
• Woocommerce – 37.7
• Shopware – 48.9

Relying on this data you can rank the platform by page speed. 

Note: These results are based just on the stores we selected for review. You should not take the data too seriously as the test was made on a nonrepresentative list of not many stores from thousands of stores using a specific platform. The goal was to summarise a series of articles that highlighted great examples of each e-commerce platform.

Let me now turn to the generalizing point. The slowest store I tested is Crest.com. It has an average score of 16. The website for Crest brand products is built with the BigCommerce. Despite the platform makes it easy for beginners to design a website from scratch, its stores listed in the table show the lowest page speed score in general.

And the fastest store is signsupplier.co.uk. The website uses Adobe/ Magento power. This platform is the most feature-rich in my opinion. Basically, it provides access to various tools that can help sites perform at a higher level. As indicated, the Sign Supplier website is built on Breeze – free and alternative JS frontend for Magento 2. So it’s quite possible that Breeze was what enabled Sign Supplier’s online store to be as fast as possible and competitive in their niche.

When it comes to the fastest e-commerce platform itself, I’d say: Just look at those figures once more and draw your conclusions. And remember that many factors can come into play when determining the fastest e-commerce platform despite the figures obtained here. 

Focus on tools to optimize your web pages for performance, not on the platform.

As shown by the article, there are some conditions behind the fast performance. I hope you will use the mentioned insights to improve your site’s loading speed.

Share your experience in the comments then. It would be great!