Guide to making your Magento e-commerce faster and more visible
Thanks to the many simple and intuitive tools now available, creating a website has never been easier. No need to call on a web developer, even for a specific online store. CMS, such as Prestashop, Shopify or Magento, allow anyone to do it alone.
As a result, the number of e-commerce sites is constantly increasing and competition is high. For example, the open source cloud platform Magento, one of the market leaders, has over 240,000 sites to its credit. Thus, Magento site acceleration is becoming one of the major challenges for CMS developers. According to a study conducted by Amazon, every second saved in loading a site represents a gain of 10% in additional turnover.
Want to know everything about speeding up a Magento site to optimize your e-commerce performance and boost your sales? We explain everything in our dedicated guide.
The speed of an e-commerce site, a competitive advantage
In the era of unlimited connectivity, Big Data, instant consumption, etc., e-commerce users are increasingly demanding and in a hurry: a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load (maximum loading time recommended by Google) is too long, we close it and move on to the next one. Which then implies a loss of potential turnover .
That’s why the loading speed of an online store is the first element that needs to be monitored and optimized constantly. Are you wondering why your Magento site is slow? Besides optimizing CSS files for the site design, the reasons for slowness are varied, but here is an overview of the most common causes:
- Images, omnipresent on websites, and even more so on an online store for product promotion, are a type of content that is heavy to download if it is not optimized: compression and good sizing of images are essential for an optimal experience;
- videos, the ideal would be to not have video content on an e-commerce site, but if their presence is essential to the company’s activity, it is better to avoid hosting them yourself;
- scripts, sometimes essential to the operation of an online sales platform, are added as the functionalities are implemented, which consequently lengthens the loading time of the site;
- hosting the site on a Cloud server, especially for cheap offers proposing services which are not in reality adapted to e-commerce sites.
Using or configuring plugins, PHP, switching to HTTPS or HTTP/2, hotlinking images, redirects, etc. are all things that can slow down the loading of a website.
Web performance at the service of e-commerce sales
Webperf, a contraction of web performance, brings together all the best practices and techniques to implement to improve the performance of a website. Performance indicators must be taken into account from the design stage of the site, and even more so for e-commerce.
Indeed, this type of site requires more resources due to their characteristic content: product catalog, numerous photos, options and value-added features, such as adding to cart, payment methods, wish lists, database management (containing all e-commerce and customer data), etc.
Building an online store architecture must be designed to meet performance needs. However, using Magento, created for e-commerce creation, already integrates a large number of features designed for performance (adapted network and server infrastructure, optimal configuration, optimized tagging plan, etc.).
Because fast e-commerce improves user browsing comfort and conversion rates, the search for web performance optimization solutions must be ongoing, because the faster the site is and the more visitors it attracts, and the denser and more engaged the traffic, the higher the business performance.
Having the web performance of your Magento e-commerce site audited is therefore essential to analyze the health of your site , detect the causes of a lack of performance and make the necessary corrections.
Criteria and tools for measuring web performance
Measuring the web performance of an e-commerce site is based on different analysis criteria :
- analysis criteria related to the behavior of e-commerce servers, the client’s browser, the use of CPU, RAM, IO, etc. (it can for example be influenced by JavaScript scripts);
- the different loading times (of the first byte, of the site elements above the fold, of the complete page, the server response time, etc.);
- elements that can slow down the performance of the site, such as the number and nature of resources (images, videos, scripts, text, etc.);
- the weight of the pages;
- the number of loading or execution errors, etc.:
- the time it takes for the visitor to interact with the page;
- the adaptability of e-commerce to mobile browsing…
There are several free tools for analyzing the web performance of a Magento e-commerce. Among the best known, some allow you to measure, among other things, the Core Web Vitals, the “Essential Web Signals”, namely the interactivity of the site, the display speed of a page and its visual stability. Let us mention:
- PageSpeed Insights, developed by Google, useful among other things for obtaining a mobile and desktop performance score, and detecting optimization levers with improvement recommendations;
- Lighthouse, another Google tool, to perform a site audit (loading time, SEO, accessibility, good web practices, etc.);
- WebPageTest to test a web page under different browsing conditions (device, network, location, etc.);
- GTMetrix, to test loading speed on different devices and geographic areas, it relies on Google’s Lighthouse;
- DareBoost to test the performance of web pages according to different criteria: speed, security, UX… and benefit from recommendations to optimize it.
If you are not yet lost in all these solutions for testing the performance metrics of your e-commerce site, let’s add that there are also paid tools offering an even more complete analysis. Carrying out tests is one thing, implementing the appropriate corrections is another, which is why getting support for Magento webperf from a professional is a guarantee for the effectiveness of your optimizations for the performance of your e-commerce, and a considerable time saving.
E-commerce sites concerned by the improvement of web performance
At this point in your reading, you may be thinking that it’s far too complicated for you and that your small e-commerce can do without these measures. But, in reality, the benefits of improving the web performance of your Magento site concern all online sales companies, regardless of their traffic and sector of activity!
Studies conducted among Internet users highlight the most important criteria expected by users of a merchant site (desktop and mobile version), namely:
- page loading speed, 75%;
- ease of finding what they are looking for, 66%;
- site adaptability to the medium, 61%;
- ease of use, 58%;
- the design of the site, 25%.
It is important to know that improving web performance offers two essential levers for an online sales activity. In addition to the speed of the site, it allows for better visibility because it promotes better referencing, knowing that SEO is fundamental for an e-commerce to attract more and more new customers. Conversely, an online store that is not performing well (in terms of loading speed) will have less chance of being well indexed by search engines despite all the efforts made in natural SEO referencing.
Improving the web performance of an e-commerce in practice
Now that web performance no longer holds any secrets for you, you are probably wondering what techniques are available to speed up your Magento site.
Because we cannot list all the solutions to the various possible problems because each site is unique, we suggest you discover the most common techniques :
- implement lazy loading (script or plugin), allowing only the content to be displayed to be loaded and not the entire page;
- update the PHP version of the site (or the server), this is the programming language used to make the e-commerce site dynamic, it ensures communication between the user’s browser and the site’s programming code;
- implement an effective cache strategy (server cache, browser, or CDN, managed via HTTP headers), to temporarily store certain information, which reduces response and display times ( some plugins are designed for this and speed up Magento)…
Finally, a high-performance and up-to-date site guarantees better security for your data and that of your customers. In addition to the security certificates specific to your e-commerce host, you are also responsible for the information you collect, including your customers’ banking data. A security breach (hacking, theft or loss of data, etc.) can have disastrous consequences for your business. Performance therefore depends as much on the quality of what is visible to your users as on the technical aspects of your e-commerce.
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