Fastest E-Shop of 2024: Who Won and How Did Major E-Shops Fare?

Which e-shop operating in the Czech market is the fastest? Just like last year, we focused on the top hundred Czech e-shops to compile a ranking based on Google user data, announce the winner, and ponder the implications for the entire Czech e-commerce sector.

In this article, we'll show you everything with the appropriate details. But first, let's address an important question: why should we even care about speed in e-commerce?

Why Have a Fast E-Shop?#

We, the speed-loving folks at PageSpeed.ONE, often discuss and write about the reasons for having a fast e-shop.

In short, improving speed from a user's perspective can increase conversions, boost traffic through more effective SEO, or lower PPC costs thanks to higher Page Experience scores in Google Ads.

Speed often impacts conversions, which is the most crucial aspect. In our business studies, we almost always see a correlation between speed and conversion rates in e-commerce. The metric most commonly affecting conversions is LCP, the speed at which the page loads and displays the largest content element.

However, there are more reasons why you should have a fast website.

If we agree that speed is important, we must also agree on how to measure it.

Measuring Speed#

Many in e-commerce keep an eye on their Lighthouse score, but this isn't a good metric for website speed. Lighthouse score only shows the results of a synthetic test of a single page.

We need a more detailed picture, ideally data directly from users. Google provides this data through its Chrome UX Report (CrUX). It offers numbers for different aspects of speed, the most important being the three metrics collectively known as Core Web Vitals:

These crucial indicators cover three areas:

• Loading Speed
  The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric measures the time taken to load the largest visible element on the page. It answers the question, “How fast does it load?” The ideal situation is under 2.5 seconds for the 75th percentile across the entire site.
• User Interaction Response Speed
  The Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric measures the time from interaction to the rendering of the next frame in the browser for all user interactions on the page. A good response is within 200 ms.
• Unwanted Layout Shifts
  The Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) metric examines the visual stability of a page during loading and browsing. It answers the question, “How much does the page jump around?” Google considers a CLS under 0.1 satisfactory.

You can obtain these metrics for the entire domain, and especially for larger sites, for specific page types in our web speed testing application.

How Did We Choose the Fastest Czech E-Shop for 2024?#

This year, we took a different approach than last year, and here we'll briefly show you the process of selecting the fastest e-commerce sites.

This time, we used the list of the 100 largest e-shops in the Czech Republic from CzechCrunch as our data source.

We compiled all e-shops into a table and downloaded Core Web Vitals metrics data for the entire domain from users. The data is from September 18, 2024.

We express the overall speed of the website with a “speed coefficient.” How is it calculated?

1. It considers the weights of individual metrics. From our data, we know that loading speed, i.e., LCP, correlates with conversions for most e-shops. Therefore, LCP has the greatest weight.
2. E-shops that do not meet the basic values of any metric automatically receive a lower rating. Here, we were inspired by Google, which already rates websites with even a single metric in the orange scale on a given device a notch lower.

So, who won based on this data?

The Fastest Czech E-Shop of 2024 is iWant.cz#

Congratulations to Smarty.cz, and hats off to them for creating such a fast e-shop!

Incidentally, Smarty.cz, a sister e-shop, came in second place. The results of both are outstanding. On mobile, we see the 75th percentile for loading speed (LCP metric) under one second (0.93 s for iWant.cz, 0.87 s for Smarty.cz), no unwanted layout shifts (CLS metric), and interaction response (INP) within limits. Excellent work!

The first place belongs to Smarty.cz for both clones of their e-shops – iwant.cz and smarty.cz.

Try these websites yourself. Their impressive speed can be experienced subjectively, not just through data.

Which other e-shops are among the fastest?

We sang praises for Hornbach's speed last year when this e-shop won in our study. We are pleased that the Hornbach team manages to keep the speed at its original level. This is by no means a given, as speed tends to deteriorate during website development. Hats off to the team behind Hornbach's website!

In third place is the Altisport.cz e-shop, which pleased our consultant eyes with, among other things, loading speed on desktops under one second. Applause goes to the team behind this e-shop as well.

What is the overall ranking and metric values for individual e-shops? First, let's look at the top ten fastest e-shops:

You can find the full results in the public table with the overall ranking. Do you already know how you or your competition fared?

How Did Famous Websites Fare?#

If we take websites by revenue, the ranking of several of them caught our attention from the top ten largest e-shops.

The now-former CZC.cz would be the sixth largest e-shop by revenue. By speed, it's the third fastest, which is an outstanding performance for a truly large website.

The current owner of CZC and Mall, Allegro, is also doing very well. Allegro is known for focusing on website speed, and their developers have been blogging about it for some time.

The eighth largest e-shop by revenue would rank around tenth place by speed as well. Thumbs up from us, and we see this as an example to follow.

How are other major players in e-commerce doing? The largest, Alza, would take a respectable 23rd place, the third largest Datart.cz 44th place, the fourth largest Mall.cz (also from the Allegro stable) is the 51st fastest e-shop. The speed of the second largest Rohlík would only suffice for 85th place.

There is clearly an opportunity here for smaller e-shops. In the table of the largest hundred e-shops, there are very poor websites from a speed perspective, which trouble users with over five seconds loading speed (LCP) or more than a second response to user interaction (INP), which is very, very bad.

Conclusion#

Congratulations to the winners, namely the authors of the websites iWant.cz, Hornbach.cz, and Altisport.cz!

We are pleased that even large e-shops can be fast, bringing conversions to operators through user satisfaction.

We are also pleased that when comparing last year's and this year's metric values, we see decent improvements.

At the same time, this study has once again shown that some large e-shops have gaps in web performance, and there are opportunities for smaller e-shops in this area.

In the continuation of the article, you'll learn what advice you can take away for your e-shop's speed.

---

Need help with the speed of your e-shop or monitoring? Get in touch.

Tagy:PageSpeed.czRychlost webu