There will be many reasons to choose a specific platform. But with Core Web Vitals and HTTP Archive data combined, we will be able to make an informed choice thanks for combining these into the Technology report.
It's not always doable to just compare experiences between two competitors or platforms. But with maybe millions of data points per platforms, all datapoints together should give us a clear picture of overall UX hygiene, one would think.
When technology report cannot be used to compare data
But is it then always save to compare data based on the platform alone? It often will be, but not when a platform can be used for multiple purposes: building both a website and a webshop. Or when one platform has multiple (popular) versions.
Multiple platform versions
The most well-known example is Magento. Version 1 and 2 then comes to mind. Both will be identified as Magento. The same applies to Shopware: both version 5 and 6 are popular by now.
When comparing data, you never really know if numbers are good because of an older version, or a follow-up platform version. For example: Magento 2 introduced way more JavaScript then Magento 1. Often also in a non-performant way. So when seeing Magento data, there is a chance that all those -in general- more performant Magento 1 webshops are skewing results.
So, when comparing those platforms, you then also need to know how the growth of a successor version (for example Shopware 6) is compared to its predecessor (Shopware 5).
When a platform is a website + webshop builder
But there is another group as well that might be harder to compare with competitor platforms. Laravel and Duda could fall in this group. Both are examples of platforms that can be used when you want to build a website or webshop.
Let’s use Duda in this article. Someone notified me of the fact that Duda is one of the platforms with very good Core Web Vitals results. Which is true.
It will then also be one of the better platforms when you would put it in a fight with other e-commerce platforms. But I explained it would not be a fair comparison.
The literal question I got was:
Why is it hard to compare Duda to other e-commerce platforms?
The additional explanation that came with this question was that there was no distinction between Duda websites and Duda webshops. Luckily, the reason is simple: e-commerce comes with different challenges than websites. For example the TTFB due to the amount of tasks.
So there actually is a distinction. Maybe not in codebase. But when it comes to impact on real UX, codebase alone is not all that could be impacting Core Web Vitals.
