Performance Benchmark Report first half of 2026 for Shopware 6

How does your Shopware 6 store’s PHP backend performance compare to other operators of Shopware in general?

To answer this question, we have aggregated and anonymized performance data from over 300 Shopware 6 stores over the first half of 2026 and computed benchmark numbers to compare to for the most important page types: Product details, Category, Search, and Homepage.

We previously made these benchmarks for 2025 Q1, 2025 Q2, and the second half of 2025. Going forward, these will be published every 6 months.

Executive Summary

• For the Shopware 6 operators in the Top 10% and 25% (excluding homepage, which is typically served much faster due to caching), the numbers show what is possible if you operate with a focus on backend performance. The top 10% of shops perform in the range of 220–350 ms on average and 430–575 ms in the 95th percentile for product, category, and search pages.
• Comparing with the previous H2 2025 benchmark, product and category pages improved across almost every cohort, both on average and in the 95th percentile. Even the slowest 10% of product and homepage shops got faster, not slower, this time.
• For shops in the worst 10%, Category and Search performance got significantly slower than before across our customer base.
• Homepage response times improved the most in relative terms: the top 10% of shops are nearly 30% faster on average (41 ms vs. 57 ms) and more than 40% faster in the 95th percentile (55 ms vs. 95 ms).
• Search shows a mixed picture: the fastest 10% of search pages got marginally slower on average (351 ms vs. 335 ms), but the slowest 10% improved dramatically, more than 40% faster on average (2,303 ms vs. 3,967 ms) than in the previous report.
• Unlike the previous period, the slowest 25% of shops did not get worse this half. Most cohorts held steady or improved slightly, suggesting the negative trend flagged in the last report has not continued.
• The fastest and slowest 10% remain far apart, ranging from about 5.7 times apart for product pages to nearly 30 times apart for homepages, showing that there is still tremendous potential in analyzing and optimizing PHP backend performance with tools like Tideways.

Benchmark of average response times

Benchmark of 95th percentile response times

Methodology

The data foundation for this is daily average and 95th response times of PHP requests in Shopware 6 shops that have an active Tideways subscription or trial during the first half of 2026 and reported data to our backend. This is measured through the Tideways PHP extension, tapping into the PHP runtime.

From a Core Web Vitals perspective, this is an approximate benchmark for the Time to First Byte (TTFB) of all requests in the shop that are served by the PHP backend. Requests served cached from Varnish, Fastly or other HTTP cache in front of the shop are not included.

A shop must have had at least 5,000 storefront requests that day processed by PHP in the backend and 250 requests of the page type to be included. Only shops using the default controllers for the product details, category list, search, and homepage page types are considered. This leads to 91,939 data points included in the report.

Take these numbers with a grain of salt because they intentionally include Shopware users across all major PHP and Shopware versions, with Elasticsearch or MySQL-based search, with Shopware’s HTTP Cache enabled or using external HTTP caches (Varnish) and across all industries and customer personas.

See where your store ranks

To see where your Shopware 6 store is ranking, sign up for a free trial with Tideways and collect backend performance data. Tideways can recommend performance optimizations and provides effortless insights into all code-level performance problems.

If you need our help with Shopware 6 performance optimization, see our 8000€ fixed price offer for a performance optimization sprint.