For those of you that weren’t there for last year’s blog post on web performance, titled “What is the Best E-Commerce Platform for Web Performance?“, let me catch you up on the purpose of this little study of ours.

Why is web performance a big issue for e-commerce companies?

Well it’s a simple calculation, really. 😉

“Time is money”, as the saying goes. So for an ever growing economy like the e-commerce business, that amounted to $1,915 billion of worldwide revenue in 2016 (and who will keep increasing by up to 20% each year, in the near future), time truly is of the essence.

And in the e-commerce world, who is the worst enemy of speed (and thus revenue)? Bad web performance.

So you can imagine how most companies, aware of the importance of e-commerce and heavily invested in the field, would want to get the better out of their CMS platform, and achieve a high level of performance and user experience. Simply because if your e-store is slow, customer won’t come / stay / buy, and you’ll have lost a lot of money in customer acquisition / marketing / development / …etc.

Why choosing the right CMS platform is such an important decision for web performance?

Using a CMS to build an online store is a sound tactical choice. It allows you to focus on:

• sales, instead of on the technical aspects of running an online store,
• SEO and marketing actions,
• or even on the finer points of you internet catalogue.

However, using a CMS instead of a custom-made platform for an e-shop is not without consequences:

• By default, it often implements many functionalities that might not be useful, which can make the overall system quite heavy and slow at first.
• It can be more or less prone to bugs, slowdowns or even downtimes; depending on how the CMS is built and customized after installation.

So when it comes down to it, to your speed and conversion rate, choosing the right CMS platform for your e-store is crucial.

And that is why, for the second year in a row, we decided to conduct a study on the performance of 7 leading, well-known, or brand new, e-commerce platforms that seem to be all the rage in 2017. 😉

The idea is to establish a ranking, and find out which one of the platforms delivers the most stable and fastest experience during the classic e-commerce sales funnel.

So without further ado, here is our 2017 competitors pick for the Best E-commerce Platform competition:

• WooCommerce,
• Shopify,
• Magento (we combined the results for Magento EE and CE, but we’ll be sure to do a more thorough blog post on their respective performances later on),
• Prestashop,
• BigCommerce,
• Drupal Commerce,
• and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (former Demandware).

You’ll notice on the chart below, representing the worldwide proportion of websites for each of our chosen CMS, that some in our selection have quite small communities. But we do believe that these CMS present high hopes for the future of e-commerce, in terms of technology, so we’ve decided to test them nonetheless.

METHODOLOGY FOR THIS STUDY

How did we select the websites for the study?

Like for our 2016 CMS platforms study, the study was carried out on a panel of 120 websites (20 per technology), with an Alexa ranking between 200 000 and 600 000. The medium values revolve around rank 430.000, which represents websites with approximately 67.000 visitors/month.

Choosing such a range gives more representativity to the study, since these websites are more likely to meet minimum UX and performance agreed-upon standards.

How did we analyze the performance?

The data was collected using our monitoring tool, Quanta: it reproduces the behavior of a visitor going through the classic sales funnel (Home > Category > Subcategory > Product > Cart), and analyzes the speed and availability of each page from the Home Page to the Cart.

Selected sites are analyzed every minute, 24/7, during 14 days. The tool goes through the main five pages of the website (pages following the sales funnel, ndlr), every minute. And does this for every website selected for the study. This represents a total of 600 clicks per minute, and a total amount of 12 millions HTTP requests for the whole study.

The numbers featured throughout the study are the median values for each page of a regular sales funnel, out of the 20 websites selected per CMS. That is to say that for a better reading comfort, we displayed the median results for all websites, per CMS.

For each technology, we created a summary in the form of an illustration, displaying availability rates and page load times, for each step of an ordinary sales funnel.

Disclaimer. You may notice that the further you go into the sales funnel, the more results are likely to decrease. That’s perfectly normal since the results are added up to each step that follows.

Now, let’s cut the chit-chat and dive right in! 😉

STUDY

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the leading e-commerce platform on the market. Free and easy to use, it works as an extension of WordPress, and thus:

• does not require an external hoster,
• uses the same plugins as the ones for WordPress (ex: for SEO, it’s Yoast SEO),
• has many themes and plugins available to upgrade the stores,
• and is very scalable, making it a good solution both for big and small companies.

But even with all these technical advantages, it’s too early to declare WooCommerce as the ideal solution for performance. That was the case in 2016, and it remains so today.

The performance test shows that WooCommerce is still overly average in terms of availability and average response time (ART).

The average page load time for all monitored stores is 0,63 seconds (s), which is OK, but not great considering that the immediacy threshold, the holy grail of web performance hailed by Google itself, is 100 milliseconds. Plus, out of the 20 tested websites, we noticed a big a gap in the ARTs; proving that WooCommerce is not a reliable platform in its “out of the box”configuration. For example, a cart once loaded in 4,14 s!

However, it’s true that the results are way better than last year’s. The Home Page and the Cart remain big performance bottlenecks, but we’ve seen a 20% increase in speed for these two steps.

For the availability, WooCommerce comes in 3rd in our competition. With its 99,87% availability rate on average (0,35% more than last year), the solution is stable, even if it still represents a 13 minutes downtime every week on average.

In conclusion, despite its great technical advantages and its increased availability and average response time, WooCommerce as it is often set up, can’t be considered a reference in matters of performance. Of course, in some measure, you can overcome its slowness by:

• using a hoster specialized in WordPress and WooCommerce websites,
• using additional modules like WP Rocket,
• compressing big and heavy images,
• or caching the maximum number of elements in your code.

Shopify

The Canadian solution Shopify is very easy to use if you want to launch an e-commerce platform. It was created in 2006, in order to build a complete website in ten minutes, tops.

Shopify is an all-in one e-commerce platform, which doesn’t require any knowledge in development to set up. You simply have to create your catalogue with the articles, texts and images you need for the store. The structure of the website and themes are already provided when subscribing to the solution.

Shopify is not only simple, but also very performant. Again! The data extracted from our study revealed that on average, web pages loaded in 0,35 s, when the Google Guidelines recommend an average of 0,50 s for loading times! Thanks to its fast response times and results, Shopify delivers a very good overall user experience.

But contrary to last year, Shopify can’t be considered the most stable solution. It actually comes in 6th, with its 99,83% Sales Funnel availability (99,95% last year), on average. Of course, this could be explained by the increase in worldwide availability incidents but still, it’s a little bit disappointing for our 2016 Performance Champion. It represents a 17 minutes downtime each week.

Such performances can be explained by the fact that Shopify is a full-Saas platform; meaning that it manages both the CMS and its hosting. This specificity is definitively an advantage pertaining to loading times and availability, but the drawback is that when Shopify’s servers are down or suffer a slowdown, all the websites hosted are affected in the same way. If you want to know more about this subject, I actually wrote a blog post on the impact of the 2016 Dyn DNS attacks on Shopify websites. You can find it here.

Magento

Created in 2008, Magento is an open-source e-commerce solution, with a big and active community, providing advanced user assistance and many dedicated extensions. It is currently the leading e-commerce platform in Europe, with more than 230 000 websites using their technology.

However, to this day, it remains quite difficult to master, due to its architecture and all its functionalities. Skilled developers are often needed to undertake modifications.

During our study, we discovered that, in 2016, Magento has been a rather stable platform since the availability rate reached 99.89%, on average, which is better than 2015’s 99,71%. The availability rate for the Subcategory, Product and Cart steps are way more satisfactory. So it comes in 3rd position in terms of general availability.

Although Magento websites are the most frequented (with an average of 3000 visitors per day), they are not the fastest! The results showed that the pages, composing a classic user’s sales funnel, loaded in 0,60 s on average, which is beyond the “under 500 milliseconds” goal set by Google. And even if the Product’s average response time has been cut by half since last year, it remains far from the racing cars that are the likes of Shopify.

Nonetheless, Magento’s Cart load time is reasonable with a result of 0,58 s; which is fast enough to retain clients until the end of the sales funnel.

In conclusion, we can safely say that Magento is a complex machine, making it slower than the average other solutions.

To improve its performance, try using Varnish, or the built-in Full Page Cache functionality, developed by Magento itself. Those two popular cache systems can really boost you store and help it near the sweet spot of 100 milliseconds, the immediacy threshold.

PrestaShop

Since its public release in 2007 PrestaShop has been a very popular CMS in France. The solution is used by 250,000 websites across the globe, and has a huge community (1 million community members!).

PrestaShop is free to download and install, and provides native basic functionalities. However, in order to have a fully functional website, it is necessary to download themes and extensions in the PrestaShop market, which are hardly ever free…

The analysis of PrestaShop websites’ performance showed average results. The average speed for every page is 0,65 s, with the Cart being the fastest page at 0,56 s. It presents significantly better results compared to last year’s, particularly for the Category and Subcategory pages.

However, PrestaShop still presented a very good (even if a little bit diminished) availability rate of 99,90%, garnering it the 2nd place in our competition for Best Availability.

Those results could possibly be improved using many optimization and caching tools the solution provides, as well as choosing hosting services fitted for PrestaShop, using a CDN and reverse proxy solutions.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is our second full-SaaS solution. A CMS that we chose to include in this 2017 edition of our study, because of its growing reputation and use by e-commerce companies. Created in 2009 by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper, following a chance meeting in an online chatroom in 2003, it is tailored for fast-growing, mid-market, companies.

Unlike a Magento or a Drupal Commerce, BigCommerce offers few customization options. There are four different levels of pricing – Standard, Plus, Pro and Enterprise -, that each offer specific features and services. So if you’re looking for a close-to-custom-made platform, BigCommerce is not made for you.

But even if it wears proudly its “Full-SaaS feel” when it comes to customization, BigCommerce is a great choice when it comes to overall web performance.

As you can see on the illustration below, most of the indicators for the Sales Funnel steps, for both availability and ART, are in the green. With its average response time of 0,50 s, BigCommerce is a fast platform. This response time places it in the third position of our competition for Best Average Response Time, and matches exactly the recommendation of Google when it comes to speed.

As is customary for many full-SaaS CMS, it is also quite stable. With an average availability rate of 99,87%, BigCommerce seems to be a valid option for e-commerce websites.

Drupal Commerce

We monitored a panel of Drupal Commerce stores. Created in 2011, Drupal Commerce is an extension of Drupal, adding to the original CMS all the e-commerce features needed by online companies. It is free and open-source.

One of Drupal Commerce’s particularity, is to be really well-fitted for SEO, which allows websites to climb the rankings in Google search engine.

Drupal Commerce was a rather good solution when it came to performance. In fact, the medium for the pages load time is 0,56 s, which represents the fourth best performance out of all the technologies tested, very close to SaaS solutions like Shopify and BigCommerce!

With 99.86% availability rate, Drupal Commerce represents the sixth most available technology among the tested CMS. But even if it seems poor, Drupal Commerce remains a reliable technology to use for an e-commerce store.

However, creating and updating a Drupal Commerce based website is not as simple as using Shopify or PrestaShop. It requires a dedicated team of developers, and thus, to invest some time and money into the setup.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud (former Demandware)

And last but not least, here comes Commerce Cloud. It is a cloud-based e-commerce platform created in 2004 by Stephan Schambach, and purchased in 2016 by Salesforce to reinforce its e-commerce services.

Commerce Cloud was conceived as a full SaaS platform with a touch of predictive technology, that aims at managing all the aspects of an e-business: hosting, marketing, and customer services. As you can see in the “CMS Proportion 2017” chart in the beginning of this study, Commerce Cloud is not a widely used CMS at the moment. But we chose to include it in our study because we do believe that the Salesforce buy will give this CMS nw possibilities of expansion.

That being said, let’s take a look at the results of our web performance test.

If you’ve been with us since the beginning of this study, the results in the graph below should not really be a surprise to you. As a Shopify or a BigCommerce, Commerce Cloud presents overall excellent results when it comes to availability and average response time.

See? Green almost everywhere! Commerce Cloud presents the best overall results in both availability rate and average response time.

The medium average response time is a tiny 0,35 s, with a really fast Cart that peaks at 0,23 s. Yup. That’s closing fast on the immediacy threshold, and are pretty impressive results.

But Commerce Cloud is not only fast, it is also really stable. With its 99,96% availability rate (which represents only 5 minutes of downtime each week), it’s the number 1 reliable CMS platform for this year’s study.

AND THIS YEAR BEST WEB PERFORMANT PLATEFORM IS…

Before unveiling the name of this year Web Performance champion, we thought it was a good idea to look more precisely at the availability rate and average response time results.

As we’ve said before, every e-company is different, and its unique features call for a tailored choice of CMS. Even if web performance as a whole must remain the key factor in choosing a CMS, some businesses will want to focus on availability, or on average response time.

So, here you go. Here are the results for the Best Availability Rate, and Best Average Response Time rankings.

As expected, the full Saas platforms perform well, especially when it comes to the average response times (advantage only possible because they host the websites themselves, instead of employing an external hosting service and communicating with it). And we can also conclude that it is not the most used platforms that presents the most impressive results. Moreover, if you compare these results to last year’s ranking, it cements the idea that CMS platforms, like all technology, evolve throughout the time, and that yesterday’s good results do not necessarily mean tomorrow’s success.

But these rankings are just partial answers to our founding question of “Who is the best web performant CMS platform for 2017?”. So without further ado, here is the definitive podium.

Drum roll please!

We’re pleased to announce that, after taking into account all the datas provided and analyzed, the most web performant e-commerce platform is Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

The study revealed Commerce Cloud websites tends to be faster and more stable than other CMS-based websites. And more broadly, that seems to be the case for the other Saas CMS, like Shopify and BigCommerce.

BigCommerce is also a fast and reliable full Saas solution, garnering it the second place on our podium.

And last, but not least, on the 3rd step of our podium, we find Magento, that represents a safe and good option in terms of web performance. Even if it is not the fastest, or the most available, its medium scores in these two areas makes it a well balanced platform.

Of course, if your site runs under Prestashop, or WooCommerce, there is no reason to be alarmed! The results of all these platforms are very close, and the differences between the different rankings on the podium are often minimal. But we do believe that a little healthy competition can nudge the publishers of these solutions to better take into account the issue of web performance. 😉

Moreover, we observed during the study that significant differences could exist in the performance of sites running on the same technology. It’s just that some sites are better tuned than others. This only reinforces my belief (and the message I tried to get through to you!) that a CMS will never be perfect “out of the box”, and that optimizations to cater to the specific needs of an e-commerce website are absolutely necessary.

LAST WORDS

And this conclude this year Best Web Performant CMS Platform competition!

But here is a little sneak peek at our 2018 edition.

QUANTA’s Head of Operations, Matthieu Rosinski, tested the performance and scalability of Oro‘s new cutting-edge platform, OroCommerce, and the results were very promising! So we can’t wait for next year to come, and hope that we’ll have the opportunity to test the web performance of these  websites. 😉

Remember that the most important conclusion to be drawn is that the technology used for a website is not the only key factor to get good performances.

Relying only on a CMS native availability or speed will certainly lead to poor performance, and numerous issues. So, to get the best performances possible, it is crucial to rely on a professional team of developers, who will be able to maximize website optimization, and improve page load time speed. And this, even for full Saas CMS platform that, even if performant in their out-of-the-box configurations, need fine tuning to push further the boundaries of web performance.

L’article What is the Best E-Commerce Platform for Web Performance? – 2017 Edition est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

The increased weight of your files is not something trifling. It has a direct impact on the speed of your website, and thus, on your user’s experience (as it has been discussed at length on this blog 🙂 ). But what about conversion and ROI?

Most of the major players in the tech world, among which Amazon and Google, agree on the importance of fast loading times for conversion to ensure that customers make it through the entire sales funnel, and actually make the purchase.

This is why more and more websites are striving to make web performance their top priority. And it was certainly the case for Jonak.

An enhancement by 630 ms

Jonak is a Parisian women’s shoes brand generating a high volume of traffic (more than 3500 visitors per day). Their website took on average 5.52 seconds per page to load just before their optimization period, in December 2015 – way above the market accepted medium estimated at around 400 ms per page.

Aware of the consequences of poor performance, the brand decided to manage (monitor and then optimize) its web performance with QUANTA.

The results were outstanding, as Jonak experienced an improvement of 630 ms per page.

It may seem like a small improvement at first sight, but try to multiply this by the number of pages seen per year by each visitor, and you’ll end up with a total cumulated loading time superior to a year and a half!

Just think of the frustration of a visitor experiencing all this waiting in front of a blank page…

Highly positive impacts thanks to optimization

Following the adoption of QUANTA and an optimization project on their e-commerce platform, Jonak reduced by 10,5% their loading times.

But even if these numbers are impressive, the most important information is the effect that these optimizations had on the conversion rate that increased by 32% by the end of January 2016! Yep. 32%.

The work undertaken by Jonak’s web teams enabled a major increase in conversion and online sales. The website is now faster, more accessible, more fluid, and thus optimal for a better user experience.

So thanks to this case study, we can clearly see that working on web performance leads to a better R.O.I. for each visitor, basically more sales with the same amount of marketing investments.

Web performance is therefore a key for your e-commerce website’s conversion.

L’article +32% of conversion for Jonak thanks to web performance est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

We’ve been working with Footcenter (a Panini company) for some time now, and they’ve been nice enough to let us share their data, and good results, with you, to testify of the importance of web performance for e-commerce websites.

BEFORE OPTIMIZATION

Let’s start this case study by just having a quick look at the timings of Footcenter store at the beginning of the mission.

That is how we found out that the loading times for each step of the classic sale funnel were far above what we recommend:

The total loading time for the classic sales funnel was, on average, 7,84s!

At QUANTA, our recommendation is that each page should load in under 300ms, which means that the entire sales funnel should load in no more than 1,5s. It’s a conservative goal compared to the “100 ms goal” decided by Google. These loading time goals are crucial when talking about SEO, User Experience, ..etc.

So you can see how the numbers of Footcenter were far from being satisfactory and that’s why they mandated us. But the main focus of QUANTA is not (and never should be) in the loading times by themselves, it should be: what is the impact of these loading times on the turnover of an e-commerce website?

Well, just see for yourself. Here’s a parallel between:

• the loading times monitored,
• the conversion rate per minute,
• and the estimated turnover loss due to slow page load times.

Footcenter before optimization – Screenshots of the “Page load time”, “Conversion rate” and “Turnover” widgets from QUANTA

Not so good, ha? A conversion rate per minute of 0.91% on average, and thus an estimated turnover loss of almost 13%. And all that because of a slow website, at each step of the sales funnel.

Of course, we didn’t pull these estimations out of a hat. 😉 These estimations were calculated by QUANTA’s “Conversion rate” and “Turnover” widgets, two of the many widgets available in the Business Dashboard feature of our monitoring tool, powered by none other than Google Analytics data.

But getting back to business. After we realized how important the margin of improvement was, both in loading times and turnover, it was time to get to work.

And that’s when working hand in hand with a conscientious web agency comes in handy. Not convinced? Well, just have a look at the results below!

AFTER OPTIMIZATION

As said before, our straightforward plan, in working with Footcenter, was:

• Improve the page load times for every step of the sales funnel.
• Increase the conversion rates.
• Reduce the turnover loss due to slow page load times.

And we did it ! Here are the graphs, after optimizations, that give you an idea of the power of web performance.

Footcenter after optimization – Screenshots of the “Page load time”, “Conversion rate” and “Turnover” widgets from QUANTA

You can clearly see in the graphs that optimizing the website had a drastic effect on page load times. The “Home” load time went from 1.44s to a very good 23.94ms on average. For the entire sales funnel, Footcenter went from a staggering 7.84s, to just 1.37s on average! It means that the entire sales funnel process is now 81 % faster than before optimization.

And as you can also see in the graph, this surge in speed had a spectacular effect on conversion rates, and thus turnover.

The conversion rate per minute went from 0.91% to 1.12%, which indicates an increase in conversion of 23%.

And the turnover loss due to slow page load times went from 12.55% to just 1.67%, which indicates a reduction by 86% of the losses in turnover. That translates to a staggering 23% of additional turnover, far exceeding our expectations!

CONCLUSION

Optimizing a website can be touchy, and costly, if you don’t have the right tool and the right team for it. But, it’s really worth it.

In Footcenter case, the ROI due to the optimizations was about 500%, in just 4 weeks (and this includes QUANTA’s annual license price, and the time spent working on this case by QUANTA’s and web agency x2i’s teams). So, over a year, your investment is going to be 60x reimbursed.

Before bringing this case to a close, 2 piece of advice:

• The link between slow page load times and increased conversion rate / turnover is undeniable. So it is essential to optimize all e-commerce platforms, or take the web performance into consideration when building one.
• When your site is optimized, keep it that way. Really, it’s easier to keep your site optimized, than doing heavy optimization sessions like this one.

And for the final word. Be it in terms of accuracy in the predictions, monitoring, optimizations, or the features offered by QUANTA, this case study really shows that our tool can be a crucial asset in improving the web performance and the profitability of an e-commerce platform.

Now? Would you be willing to spend 1$ to get 5$ back in just 4 weeks? Of course you would… right? 😉

L’article How Footcenter gained 23% of additional turnover thanks to webperf! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

ETAM’s page speed load time reduced by 700 ms

Etam is a luxury lingerie brand among the top 5 sites using Magento in France, with over 200 million page views per year. When we met with Etam’s website managers, their site only had a 1.2 second page speed loading time. Not really shocking at first sight. It is common to see e-commerce shops charge slowly. There is a lot of space for optimisation.

With the support of Quanta monitoring and tracking solution, the load time of Etam’s online store has been reduced to 500 ms, thus saving 700 ms. This may seem like only a slight gain but if we multiply the time saved, by the number of page loads  per year (200 million),that makes 4.4 years of waiting time saved! This is HUGE!

It shows how a small win has ultimately a strong impact in a global context. Imagine… 4.4 years of waiting time before a blank page while hoping for the desired page to be displayed!

By saving time, users enjoy a more comfortable navigation. They take advantage of a better UX and are therefore inclined to see more pages, interact more strongly, and will thus subtly go further in the sales funnel! E-shopping is no longer a stress but instead a nice ”ride” from the browser. Are they more likely to buy at the end of the funnel? Yes.

The impact of improved speed on ETAM performance

After optimisation, ETAM’s site has seen several of its indicators increase in Google Analytics:

• The number of page views per session has increased by 28%;
• The average time per visit increased by 21%;
• The conversion rate increased by 20%.

The optimisation work carried out by Baobaz agency and ETAM’s web team using the Quanta solution is a textbook case! Indeed, the brand now enjoys a site that is accessed faster, deeper, and transforms better. The effectiveness of the marketing team with the offers on and off-site is strengthened. Speed was the missing link to generate new sales and provide better visibility to the product range without any external action.

If you want to calculate your ROI linked to an action on your website’s speed, remember that Quanta offers diagnostic performance of your Magento website. Our experts will then connect to your site and make an initial assessment with you, letting you know the  percentage of conversion possible to aim for.

L’article ETAM earns 20% of conversion by optimising its online store est apparu en premier sur Quanta.