Why is my Magento site slow?
The fact that your Magento site is slow can have consequences on sales and turnover, but also on brand image and natural referencing. Indeed, the speed of a site is one of the criteria taken into account by Google to index and classify sites in its search results pages. In an increasingly competitive world, companies must offer their customers an ideal user experience, of which page loading time is a part.
So, yes, you notice that your Magento site is slow, but for what reasons ? How can you find an effective solution to this problem? Between the weight of images, server response time, management of scripts and third-party applications, we invite you to discover our advice for improving the performance of your Magento site and, more specifically, improving the speed of your online sales site.
Slow Magento Site: The Problem of Unoptimized Resources and Code
The Magento CMS, just like Prestashop or WordPress, is a content management platform. But behind an online store are hidden many resources: images, files, code, etc. If a site is slow, whether it is a Magento site, a Prestashop site or a WordPress site, it is necessary to start by analyzing and optimizing all of its resources.
Page Load Time and Image Optimization
Among the resources of a website, images occupy a predominant place. They are used to present products in a store. They can be used by Google for natural referencing. They are the embodiment of the brand and they generate emotions in customers. But images can also reduce the performance of your website and slow down the loading time of your pages if they are too heavy or poorly optimized. To avoid this, you must:
- compress images so they are smaller and load faster on a page – there are free online tools or Magento modules that can do this, and the best option is to automate this operation to process all your images on the fly with the best compression formats (like the Fasterize engine does);
- ensure the dimensions of the images to adapt their size to the screen, computer or mobile phone (the Fasterize engine also allows images to be automatically resized according to the screen on which they are displayed).
The heavier an image is, the longer it will take to load and the more it will degrade the user experience. The size of an image and its weight are therefore two determining data that can slow down your online sales site.
It is also possible to use the lazy loading technique . Lazy loading, or lazy load, consists of delaying the loading of images located below the fold, and triggering it only when the images need to be displayed in the viewport . This technique allows you to display only what is necessary for the user, instead of loading the entire content of the page.
Optimize code to improve user experience
Code minification is a solution to optimize the resources of a Magento site. By minifying JavaScript, CSS and HTML files , you can improve the loading time of your pages.
More concretely, unnecessary data is removed from the code . This is the case, for example, of line breaks, spaces, comments, etc. In addition, functions and variables in the code are renamed to take up less space: from ten characters they can then go to two characters. This minification treatment does not affect the user experience in any way, quite the contrary.
Of course, you will have the possibility to minify your code by hand, but it is recommended to use tools to automate this action. This will avoid manual errors and save time, and this is what the Fasterize engine allows you to do, to process all the code of your Magento e-commerce site automatically.
The impact of hosting on website speed
There are different solutions for hosting a website. The choice of hosting influences the budget, but also the performance of an online store or website.
First, the server you choose must be adapted to your usage. Depending on the volume of traffic and the number of requests, you will need to choose a server capable of supporting the load. The loading time, and especially the server response time of the pages, is one of the criteria taken into account by Google for the natural referencing of sites, or SEO . If your Magento site is slow, Google will have less ease in indexing it, and your pages will be less likely to rise in the search results.
Second, page load times can be reduced by a content delivery network, also called CDN , or Content Delivery Network. If your Magento site is slow, and you have an international distribution, you should consider adopting a CDN to solve this slowness problem. The content delivery network, or CDN, is a server platform whose objective is to reduce the loading time of the content of the pages of your website. It therefore reduces the latency between the browser request and the server response. A CDN solution will have beneficial effects on loading times when browsing from a computer, but also from a mobile.
Third parties, or third-party applications, and page load times
Third parties are present on a vast majority of websites, because they provide access to essential applications. Indeed, these applications are used to offer a content personalization tool on a website page, geolocation, etc. It can also be a chat or links to social networks. Tracking and A /B testing are also part of third-party applications.
It is because third parties help improve the user experience and generate revenue that they have become essential and increasingly numerous. But when they are poorly configured, they can cause latency and have a negative impact on interactivity. The page loading time becomes longer, thus degrading the user experience and causing the online store to lose revenue.
If a web page has poorly implemented third parties, the loading time will be longer. It is even possible that users will leave the page before all third-party applications are loaded. In this case, third parties will not collect information about these users and will provide biased overall statistics.
If your Magento site is slow, start by doing a detailed analysis of your third-party applications. You can then establish priorities based on your goals and the features that are essential to your website. Finally, some third parties that do not impact the overall performance of your online store can be disabled. In a few words: prioritize and prioritize your third-party scripts!
Anticipate peak visits to keep a Magento site fast
Over the course of the year, an online store may experience several increases in traffic, sometimes very significant. A traffic spike can be the result of different events:
- a large-scale advertising campaign;
- a “buzz” on social networks;
- calendar holidays such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, Easter, etc.;
- summer sales and winter sales, Cyber week (Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.)…
A sudden increase in traffic can have irreversible consequences for an e-commerce site . Indeed, the slowdown in page loading time significantly degrades the user experience. Overloaded servers no longer allow smooth navigation for customers who leave the website. Sales targets are not achieved and the ROI of marketing campaigns is also degraded.
To prevent a Magento site from becoming slow during traffic peaks or load peaks, it is essential to anticipate the optimization of its performance . If this action was not carried out when the site was created or when it was put online, it is possible to do it later. Cache strategy, frontend optimization, optimizations for mobile, improvement of server response times, optimization of code and resources … there are many solutions to improve the performance of your online sales site.
To conclude, a slow Magento site is not inevitable. You have many tools at your disposal to find the origin of the problem and resolve it. Improving web performance requires rigor and technical knowledge, and they must be maintained over time, as you probably already do for your SEO. Starting from a reliable diagnosis, you will be able to implement quick, effective and sustainable actions.
We recommend these other pages:
