Performance Benchmark Report first half of 2026 for Magento 2

How does your Magento 2 store’s PHP backend performance compare to other operators of Magento in general?

To answer this question, we have aggregated and anonymized performance data from over 250 Magento 2 stores over the first half of 2026 and computed benchmark numbers to compare to for the most important page types: Product details, Category Page, Search, and Homepage.

We previously made this benchmark for Q2 2025. Going forward, these will be published every 6 months, in line with our Shopware 6 benchmark reports.

Executive Summary

• For the Magento 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 320–370 ms on average and 400–545 ms in the 95th percentile for product, category, and search pages.
• The slowest 25% of shops average around 1.3–1.5 seconds in TTFB, and 2.4–2.9 seconds in the 95th percentile. For category and search pages, that’s still enough to push Largest Contentful Paint into “Needs Improvement” territory (above 2.5 seconds); product and homepage pages have improved enough to sit just under that threshold for this cohort.
• Without very high full page cache hit ratios, many visitors to Magento 2 shops will still experience suboptimal performance.
• Compared to our Shopware 6 benchmark for the same period, these numbers are still higher across the board — though the two remain not directly comparable, since a larger share of Magento shops rely on Varnish for cached pages rather than PHP-based full-page caching, as in Shopware 6.
• Compared with the last Magento 2 benchmark (Q2 2025), nearly every cohort improved substantially, often 30–50% faster. Treat this comparison with caution, though: this report now covers a full half-year rather than a single quarter, spans roughly a year later, and the underlying sample has grown from about 70 to over 260 stores, so part of the shift may reflect a different, larger sample rather than the same shops getting faster.
• The fastest and slowest 10% of shops are roughly 6 to 11 times apart, 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 Magento 2 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 73,039 data points included in the report.

Take these numbers with a grain of salt because they intentionally include Magento users across all major PHP and Magento versions, with Elasticsearch or MySQL-based search, with Magento’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 Magento 2 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.