One Design, Four Platforms — Measured, Not Opined

The same 420-item furniture catalogue and the same layout running on four engines: WooCommerce, OpenCart 4, a headless Astro front on the WordPress REST API, and plain WordPress with no shop plugin. All four stands are live and you can open them side by side. The speed table is not written by hand: a nightly runner measures every stand with Lighthouse — three runs, median, the same three pages on each (home, catalogue, product) — and the page pulls the numbers from a feed, so the date of every measurement is on screen. Runs taken while the server was busy are discarded rather than published, and a stand that is not fully measured says so instead of showing half a column. Next to the measured half sits the part nobody can measure — build time, running cost, who each platform is for and where it stops — marked openly as our estimate. No platform is ours: the honest table is the whole point.

• Four live stands, one design, one catalogue — open them side by side
• Speed re-measured every night; every number carries its measurement date
• Measurements taken under server load are thrown out, not published
• Measured and estimated are two separate tables, never mixed
• Five buyer scenarios → a platform and the reason, including “stay where you are”