Expedio makes Magento at least 2x faster, and Ari installs it

On October 6, scandiweb introduced Expedio, the product behind a claim we had been making for weeks, that Magento is no longer slow. Expedio changes how Magento builds each page, so the store you already run answers at least twice as fast, with the same design, the same data and the same admin. The core is now open source, and if your store is connected to Ari, one message in chat installs it.

We decided to fix the part everyone else had given up on.

Antons Sapriko, Executive Chairman of scandiweb

Where Magento is still slow

A page reaches a shopper in two halves. First the server builds the HTML and sends its first byte, and that wait is the time to first byte. Then the shopper’s browser draws the page.

Modern Magento themes such as Hyvä have largely solved the second half. On stores running them, we see good largest paint times once the HTML arrives. The first half is where Magento is still slow, and it shows in public data. In Chrome’s real-user data from HTTP Archive, August 2026, 22% of Magento sites meet Google’s “good” time to first byte of 800 ms, against 82 to 92% of Shopify sites.

It matches what we see across the Magento stores we run, where a typical page takes around a second before the browser receives anything. That wait is a large part of why merchants who look at Shopify say they want a faster storefront. Expedio gives them that speed on the store they already have.

What Expedio does

Expedio speeds up Magento’s backend, the part that builds each page before a shopper sees it. It brings the best of Shopify’s theme technology to Magento. Expedio is built on Liquid, the open-source template language created by Shopify’s co-founder and used in Shopify themes.

Expedio works under your theme rather than on top of it. A Hyvä store keeps its Hyvä theme, a Luma store keeps Luma, and both answer faster. Keeping the design still means adapting the templates underneath it, so custom themes and the extensions they touch need implementation and testing.

Expedio works with Magento 2, including Magento Open Source, Adobe Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud. It is rolled out page type by page type, and checkout keeps running exactly as it does today, so payment and shipping integrations stay untouched.

For your team, nothing they work with changes. The admin, catalog, prices, checkout, orders and the storefront design stay as they are, and the store answers faster.

How Expedio works

One principle carries most of the speed. Templates render, and they never fetch. A template declares the data it needs and turns it into markup, and the page gathers every declaration and loads it at the top, in bulk, before rendering starts.

In stock Magento, a product tile can look up its own stock, rating and label. On a category page with 48 tiles that adds up to three lookups per tile, and more for every extension that adds its own. Expedio takes that pattern away. The architecture behind it fits in five principles.

• Load at the top. Data is fetched once per page, never from inside a template
• Load only what is necessary. Because templates declare their shape, the page knows exactly which fields it needs and asks for nothing else
• Leave room to lazy-load and extend. Expensive fields such as prices can be filled after the render pass, all at once
• Cache only what is worth caching. A pure template is a function of its inputs, so its output can be reused safely
• Pre-compute as much as possible. Layout, template structure and data shaping are worked out ahead of time, so at request time rendering is joining strings

Pure templates also make caching automatic. Every piece of every page is keyed by the data it shows, including the header, the menu, product cards and filters, so when that data changes, only that piece is rendered again. Nobody has to configure it.

Magento should be fast on its own, not because a cache happened to hold the page. Every page in milliseconds, for every visitor, every time.

Aleksandrs Mokans, Solutions Architect and Team Lead at scandiweb, the engineer behind Expedio

The benchmark

scandiweb tested Expedio on one real merchant’s Magento store on Hyvä, with about 1,000 categories and 20,000 products. Two builds ran on one ReadyMage server, the store as it runs today and the same store on Expedio, with the same hardware share, database, search and cache, and no full-page cache in front of either. Every request carried a random URL parameter, so no page cache could answer it. The results come from 162 runs and 487,115 requests.

• 2x+ faster response time on every page type at peak traffic, up to 25.9x on the homepage
• 6.4x faster median response time across the eight page types tested
• 3x more traffic on the same server before response times started to rise
• 3.2x faster with all caches empty, measured on category pages
• 655 database queries down to 30 on a full category page

The baseline was strong on purpose. On this server, stock Magento already answers in 70 to 472 ms without a page cache, which is faster than most Magento stores, so every gain above comes on top of good hosting.

Every figure, the method and the full tables are on the Expedio benchmark page, where you can also ask for the PDF, Benchmarks and technology behind Expedio.

See it for yourself

Open the live demo and click through the homepage, a category, a product page and search. Both stores load each page at the same time, with the timings measured live under each.

Open source, with four ways to get it

The Expedio core is open source and free for the Magento community. Every package runs the same core, and they differ in how much help comes with it.

• Expedio Open Source. The core package, documentation, step-by-step setup guides and migration skills, implemented by your developers
• Expedio Supported. Version updates, compatibility fixes and product support
• Implementation Audit. An independent review of your implementation with performance advice, for your developers or agency
• Expedio by scandiweb. Full implementation, optimization, testing and supervised launch, with 2x speed guaranteed by contract

Prices and a full comparison are on the packages page.

How Ari installs Expedio

Ari is the first AI agent for Magento, built by scandiweb. If your store is connected to Ari, write “Install Expedio on our store” in chat. Ari installs Expedio on the private copy of your store that scandiweb hosts, and you click through the preview store to check it.

The change comes back as a pull request with the full diff, and your team reviews it and releases it like any other change. Ari has no access to your servers, your pipeline or your live database. Install Expedio with Ari walks through the steps.

Hyvä and Expedio together

Hyvä took the Magento frontend as far as it goes, and Expedio does the same one layer under it. Together they make the fastest Magento setup you can run today, and Ari installs both. Moving to Hyvä with Ari keeps your design and your extensions.

Get Expedio

Start on the Expedio page, read why we built it, or ask the scandiweb team a question through the form. On October 14 you can see Expedio running live at the scandiweb stand at Mage Camp in Manchester, and on October 28 Alfreds Genkins and Glebs Vrevsky show Ari live in the first Ari webinar.