Our journey began with WooCommerce, evolved through Shopify, and now points toward a custom solution. The driving force? Speed, as measured by Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
## The Platform Journey
WooCommerce was our starting point, yielding PageSpeed scores in the 70s. We quickly moved to Shopify, but despite its $80 monthly cost (including extensions), performance only improved to the 80s.
## The Custom Solution
Inspiration struck when I discovered Deno Merch’s earlier version, which achieved perfect PageSpeed scores. Though they’ve since changed their approach, their implementation provided valuable insights for building our custom storefront.
## Current Architecture
Our shop currently runs on Shopify’s GraphQL API. While this introduces some performance overhead, we’ve still managed to achieve a PageSpeed score of 99. How? Through decoupling:
1. The core HTML/CSS loads instantly
2. Shop functionality (like the cart) initializes separately
You can see this in action at [Sternvoll](https://www.sternvoll.com) - the page loads rapidly, while the shopping cart icon takes about 500ms to become interactive.
## Performance Monitoring
Cloudflare’s API Shield (found under Security settings) provides valuable latency metrics for API endpoints, helping us monitor and optimize performance.
## Future Development
While speed remains crucial, developer experience (DX) is equally important. Our next iteration will implement tRPC to enhance both performance and development efficiency.
## Looking Ahead
With the e-commerce landscape constantly evolving, what’s your take on the trade-off between using established platforms versus building custom solutions? Have you found a sweet spot between development speed, performance, and maintainability in your projects?