The Fastest E-Shop of 2024: Who Won and How Did the Big Players Fare?

Which e-shop operating in the Czech market is the fastest? Just like last year, we've focused on the top hundred Czech e-shops to rank them based on Google user data, announce the winner, and ponder what this means for the entire Czech e-commerce landscape.

In this article, we'll present everything with the appropriate details. But first, let’s tackle the important question: why bother about speed in e-commerce at all?

Why Have a Fast E-Shop?#

We at PageSpeed.ONE, lovers of speedy websites, frequently discuss and write about the reasons for having a fast e-shop.

In brief, improving speed from a user’s perspective can boost conversions, enhance traffic through more effective SEO, or reduce PPC costs thanks to a higher Page Experience score in Google Ads.

Speed often influences conversions, which is paramount. Our business studies almost always show a correlation between speed and conversion rates in e-commerce. The metric most commonly affecting conversions tends to be LCP, or the speed at which the page loads and displays the largest content element.

There are, however, more reasons why having a fast website is beneficial.

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

Measuring Speed#

Many in e-commerce track their Lighthouse score progress, but this isn't a good metric for web speed. The Lighthouse score only shows the results of a synthetic test of a single page.

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

These vital indicators cover three areas:

• Loading Speed
  The Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric measures the time it takes to load the largest visible element on a page. It answers the question "How quickly does it load?" The ideal state is under 2.5 seconds for the 75th percentile across the entire site.
• Response Speed to User Interaction
  The Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric measures the time from performing an interaction until the browser renders a new frame, 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 the page during loading and web browsing by the user. It answers the question "How much does the page jump around?" Google considers a CLS below 0.1 to be acceptable.

You can obtain these metrics for the entire domain or, 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 websites.

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

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

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

1. It considers the weight of each metric. From our data, we know that loading speed, i.e., LCP, correlates with conversions for most e-shops, hence LCP carries the most weight.
2. E-shops that do not meet the basic values for any of the metrics automatically receive a worse rating. We were inspired by Google, which already rates sites with even one metric in the orange range 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 for creating such a speedy e-shop!

Incidentally, Smarty.cz, the sister e-shop of this family, finished in second place. Both have excellent results. 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), zero unwanted layout shifts (CLS metric), and interaction response (INP) within limits. Great job!

Thus, the first place goes to Smarty.cz for both clones of their e-shops – iwant.cz and smarty.cz.

Feel free to try out these websites. Their excellent speed can be experienced subjectively, not just by data.

Which other e-shops are among the fastest?

We sang praises about Hornbach's speed last year, when this e-shop won our study. We're glad the Hornbach team manages to maintain their speed at the 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!

The Altisport.cz e-shop secured third place, delighting our consultant eyes with loading speeds under one second on desktop. A round of applause to the team behind this e-shop as well.

What is the overall ranking and metric values for each e-shop? Let’s first look at the top ten fastest e-shops:

You can find the overall results in the public spreadsheet with the complete ranking. Do you already know how you or your competitors fared?

How Did Well-Known Websites Fare?#

If we consider websites by revenue, several of the top ten largest e-shops caught our attention.

The now former CZC.cz would be the sixth largest e-shop by revenue. By speed, it ranks as the third fastest, which is an outstanding performance for such a large site.

The current owner of CZC and Mall, Allegro, is also doing well. Allegro is known for its focused attention on web speed, and their developers have been blogging about it for some time.

The eighth largest e-shop by revenue would end up around the tenth place by speed. A thumbs up from us, as this serves as an example worth following.

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

Thus, there is an opportunity here for smaller e-shops. In the spreadsheet of the top hundred e-shops, very poor websites from a speed perspective appear, troubling users with more than five-second load times (LCP) or over a second reaction time to user interaction (INP), which is rather dreadful.

Conclusion#

Congratulations to the winners, the creators of iWant.cz, Hornbach.cz, and Altisport.cz!

We are pleased that large e-shops can also be fast and can bring conversions to operators thanks to user satisfaction.

We are also glad 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 still have gaps in web performance, providing opportunities for smaller e-shops in this area.

In the continuation of the article, you will learn what tips you can take away to improve your e-shop’s speed.

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Do you need help with your e-shop's speed or monitoring? Get in touch.

Tags:PageSpeed.ONEWeb Performance