What Is the Fastest Ecommerce Platform? (And What Can It Do for Your Business?)

Internet users are more impatient than ever. Whether you blame social media, smartphones, or everything in-between for zapping patience and attention spans, this has real implications for ecommerce. Using data from Google, Semrush recently reported the likelihood of a bounce (or a user who lands on a page and then leaves) nearly triples if a page takes more than three seconds to load. Three seconds. 

Think about it, though: if you’re shopping on your smartphone and a site is cruising along, from product pages to checkout pages with nary a lag when you enter a promo code, it projects an air of quality and dependability. It suggests the product will be good, too. All the more reason to tap the purchase button. Sites that are slow as you move from page-to-page disrupt the shopping experience. After a few seconds of lag time, you might get frustrated and jump to a different app on your phone. Then comes a new email or Slack message. There’s a decent chance you'll never return to that webstore. 

Speed is crucial. So much so that improving your site speed by even a half second has been shown to increase conversions.

A whopping 93% of brands on Shopify have a fast store, more than any other major platform. We gathered speed data on the leading ecommerce options on the market to uncover what the fastest option could do for your business. 

Methodology for measuring the fastest ecommerce platform

Our claim that Shopify site speed is the fastest in the world was calculated with publicly available data from Google Core Web Vitals, which is based on website speed data from real users and is the industry standard for measuring performance. We pulled this data for a random sample of over 200,000 sites, across a sampling of all revenue bands, verticals, and major ecommerce platforms. 

What ecommerce platforms were measured? 

Our study compared Shopify to four leading ecommerce platforms: BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Adobe Commerce (Magento), and WooCommerce.

What are the important metrics for a fast ecommerce site?

Site speed is vital, but it’s no secret that the servers needed to maintain it can be extremely costly. So is paying (and retaining) the senior-level staff you need to engineer it. 

Some companies might choose to offset costs by making tradeoffs on their websites, such as making images smaller and eliminating special plugins. This could improve speed and reduce spending, but remember that you’re competing against companies using Shopify who don’t need to make these sacrifices. 

To simplify web performance optimization (while keeping costs in check), you can look for certain indicators. 

This study analyzed homepage performance based on two metrics: 

1. Time to First Byte (TTFB), which we refer to throughout this blog as server speed, is the time it takes for the server hosting a website to respond to the customer’s browser. This is a strong indication of the quality of the underlying infrastructure. 

1. First Contentful Paint (FCP), which we refer to throughout this blog as site speed, measures the time it takes for the first element of a page (such as text or an image) to become visible to the user. 

Some readers may wonder why we focused on First Contentful Paint over Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which is also an important Core Web Vitals metric. LCP is heavily influenced by any combination of factors such as an abundance of third-party plugins or theme selection that bogs down perceived site speed. These are just a few reasons why using LCP as a benchmark for site speed is difficult and often unfair. 

What is the fastest ecommerce platform?

We crunched the numbers. Our ecommerce platform comparison reveals how the leading options measure up in quickening your webstore by those all-important seconds (and fractions of a second). Let’s take a look:

BigCommerce:

• On average, Shopify stores are 1.4x faster than BigCommerce stores. 
• 93% of Shopify stores are fast vs. only 80% of BigCommerce stores.
• Shopify’s server speed is 1.9x faster than BigCommerce’s server speed. 

Salesforce Commerce Cloud:

• On average, Shopify stores are 1.5x faster than Salesforce stores.
• 93% of Shopify stores are fast vs. only 65% of Salesforce stores. 
• Shopify’s server speed is 2.2x faster than Salesforce’s server speed.

Adobe Commerce (Magento):

• On average, Shopify stores are 2x faster than Adobe stores.
• 93% of Shopify stores are fast vs. only 53% of Adobe stores.
• Shopify’s server speed is 3.4x faster than Adobe’s server speed. 

WooCommerce:

• On average, Shopify stores are 2.4x faster than WooCommerce stores.
• 93% of Shopify stores are fast vs. only 34% of WooCommerce stores. 
• Shopify’s server speed is 3.9x faster than WooCommerce’s server speed.

The Google stats make clear what we’ve been excited about for a long time: Shopify outperforms the competition. All in all, our stores are the fastest in the world, rendering 1.8x faster than stores on other platforms. 

Shopify increases your site speed and conversion

Our sites are blazing fast by default. All Shopify plans are fully hosted by our fleet of cloud servers, which have proven to be some of the most reliable on the planet. We’ve made significant, long-term commitments to server infrastructure, and we’re excited to keep it going. Shopify has the fastest server speed in commerce, on average by 2.8x and up to 3.9x faster. 

All this means more traffic, fewer bounces, and higher conversion—the inside track to improve website performance. And with the best total cost of ownership (TCO) in commerce, we’re ready to meet your budgetary needs too.

That’s one reason why Dermalogica turned to Shopify. Dermalogica has long been an global innovator in skincare, but with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, their ecommerce experience was left playing catch-up. Salesforce struggled to adapt to the differing needs of Dermalogica’s global markets and to keep up with their customizations. Speed and conversion rates lagged.

After replatforming to Shopify, Dermalogica enjoyed a 44% improvement in site speed. Dermalogica’s customers were able to find what they were looking for much faster, and the results showed it. Bounce rate decreased by 14%, along with a 45% increase in conversion rate. 

This is just one of several examples of brands that have boosted site speed—and improved other key business metrics—by moving to Shopify. With our speedy sites and strong infrastructure, we’re committed to helping all businesses deliver the best—and fastest—commerce experiences.

Your site has only a couple seconds to make a first impression on customers. Shopify assures it’s a good one.