Post published: February 13, 2026 12:19 pm
Author: Yury Parfentsov
Total views: 30
Reading time: 4.6 min
In this article
Why We Did This
We run a hosting platform built specifically for WooCommerce. Everything is tuned for one thing: fast server response when someone is actually shopping.
But when we talk to store owners about speed, we hear the same thing:
“We’re already fast. Look at our Lighthouse score.”
And they’re not wrong.
Their homepage is fast.
The version that’s cached.
The one visitors see before they click anything.
The problem is — that’s not the speed customers experience once they start shopping.
The moment someone adds a product to their cart, everything changes.
We had a suspicion about how big that gap might be.
So instead of guessing, we tested it.
We built a crawler and measured 23,030 real WooCommerce stores — not their cached homepages, but their actual server response once a customer starts shopping.
The results weren’t small deviations.
They were structural.
This is the first of five reports.
It covers the baseline: how fast WooCommerce stores really respond when money is on the line.
Key Findings
- 1,015ms median origin response time — over a full second before anything loads
- 85% of stores exceed 500ms — the threshold where delay starts affecting conversions
- 856ms vs 1,305ms — the gap between cached homepage speed and actual cart speed
- 23,030 stores tested — revenue-generating WooCommerce sites, not hobby blogs
How We Tested
Most WooCommerce speed tests measure a clean homepage visit.
No cookies.
No cart.
No login.
The request hits Cloudflare or a page cache and comes back quickly. That number looks great in a report.
But that’s anonymous browsing.
Here’s what happens when someone actually shops:
They add a product to the cart.
WooCommerce sets session cookies.
Caching systems step aside — correctly. You can’t serve a cached cart to someone with personalized items.
Now the request goes straight to your server.
PHP starts.
WordPress loads.
WooCommerce initializes.
Plugins run.
Database queries execute.
Only then does the page begin responding.
That delay — the origin server response time — is what we measured.
For each of the 23,030 stores, we simulated a real shopping session. No cart manipulation. Just the session cookies that disable caching — exactly what happens to every customer once they interact with the cart.
This is the performance your paid traffic experiences.
The Sites
These weren’t hobby blogs.
The dataset comes from commercial lead databases filtered by revenue signals. These are stores making real money. They have marketing budgets. They run ads. They process transactions.
If anything, this group should perform better than average.
They have resources.
Test Conditions
All tests ran under consistent conditions from a European data center.
For stores hosted in North America or Asia, this adds some network latency. That means our numbers are slightly conservative. The pure server processing time may be somewhat lower locally.
Even accounting for that, the results remain high.
What We Found
The median WooCommerce store takes 1,015 milliseconds to start responding once someone begins shopping.
That’s just over one full second before anything meaningful loads.
No images.
No layout.
No checkout logic.
Just the server preparing a response.
And that’s the median.
Half of all stores are slower than that.
The Distribution
Fast WooCommerce exists. It’s just not common.
| Percentile | What it means | Response Time |
|---|---|---|
| Top 10% | The fastest stores | Under 414ms |
| p25 | Still noticeable | 644ms |
| p50 (median) | The typical experience | 1,015ms |
| p75 | Approaching two seconds | 1,627ms |
| p90 | Delay becomes obvious | 2,499ms |
| p99 | Nearly six seconds to begin responding | 5,923ms |
At higher percentiles, this isn’t a minor optimization issue.
It becomes a business constraint.
85% of Stores Take Over Half a Second to Start Responding
Why use 500ms as a reference point?
Because even large retailers have found that every additional 100ms of delay can affect conversion rates. And 500ms here is only server time — not total page load.
At 500ms, your page hasn’t even started downloading images, stylesheets, or scripts.
The Speed Gap Most Owners Don’t See
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The average cached homepage across these same stores loads in 856ms. That’s the number most benchmarks show. It looks acceptable.
But the average cart page — where purchase decisions actually happen — takes 1,305ms.
Across all uncached requests, the average origin response time is 1,316ms.
That gap — between the fast homepage and the slower cart — is the gap between how fast your store appears and how fast it feels when someone tries to buy.
Customers don’t spend money on cached homepages.
They spend money in carts and checkout.
What This Means for Store Owners
This report isn’t about blaming WooCommerce.
And it’s not a hosting sales pitch.
It establishes one practical reality:
Most WooCommerce stores rely on caching to feel fast.
But once someone starts shopping, caching no longer protects you.
At that point, your actual server performance becomes visible.
For 85% of stores in this dataset, that experience includes at least a full second of waiting before the page even begins rendering.
If you’re investing in ads, driving traffic, and optimizing creatives — this is the speed your buyers experience after they click.
The question isn’t whether your homepage is fast in a report.
The question is whether your server can keep up once someone decides to buy.
Test Your WooCommerce Speed
Most speed tests only measure cached pages. Our tool tests cart & checkout — the uncached pages where slow servers cost you sales.
The Full Data
Below is the interactive breakdown from our dataset of 23,030 WooCommerce stores — percentile distribution, slow origin stats, and methodology details.
