Thanks to a CMS, content management system, such as WordPress, creating a website is now accessible to everyone. This observation also applies to the design and management of an online sales store, using CMS developed specifically for this purpose, such as Woocommerce (WordPress extension), Prestashop, Shopify or Magento.
With more than 240,000 sites online, the open source Cloud platform Magento is positioned as one of the leaders in the e-commerce CMS market. But, faced with the constant expansion of online stores, standing out from the competition and being well positioned on search engines is a new challenge facing Magento users. This involves, in particular, an optimal user experience and the loading speed of the site.
Why and how to optimize your Magento site ? This is what we invite you to discover in our guide.
The advantages of using the Magento CMS for your e-commerce
What is Magento CMS ? Why choose Magento over WordPress, Shopify, or another e-commerce platform? What are the features of Magento? Every user of an online store CMS has asked themselves these questions at least once.
Magento CMS represents more than a quarter of the world’s online e-commerce sites, including sites of major brands such as Coca-Cola, Louboutin, Ford, etc.
Each e-commerce platform is designed to meet the needs of users, but Magento stands out for its flexibility and modularity, thanks to the addition of extensions, plugins and APIs. It also allows the complete customization of its site and its management interface since it is an open source solution. Indeed, the advantage of using an open source platform is that it is free to use, that is to say unrestricted, it is therefore possible to do what you want to adapt it 100% to your needs or requirements, such as:
- implement the same features and tools as the competition;
- develop your e-commerce according to customer expectations;
- adjust features based on increased e-commerce activity to manage larger volumes;
- have a hosting solution adapted to Magento to gain in performance;
- enjoy 24/7 technical service and data security…
When it comes to creating and managing an e-commerce, Magento is a tool with great flexibility , so the interface allows:
- management of all types of content (texts, images, videos, promotional banners, etc.);
- multi-brand management (B2B, B2C, product range differentiated according to customer profiles, smart pricing, delivery and payment method adapted to the customers’ country, etc.);
- optimization features and services (Varnish, CDN, Fastly, etc.);
- a customer segmentation feature to create and deliver personalized content based on customers, such as product recommendations;
- tools to make purchasing easier, such as instant purchase, wish list, returns management, etc.;
- PWA applications for adapting e-commerce to mobile viewing;
- the automation of numerous functions for web performance and e-commerce optimization;
- marketing tools to sell and communicate on different media without additional action;
- securing user and customer data…
Additionally, Magento makes it easy to develop an e-commerce business internationally with its multilingual feature.
The performance of e-commerce in the service of sales
We live in an era where we have everything at our fingertips, or should we say just a click away. The notion of distance and time no longer exists. Whereas before, we could have been satisfied with the products offered by a store simply because it was the only one nearby, today, with the internet, the situation changes.
All a user has to do is enter their query into a search engine to be offered a wide range of products. Online competition is strong, and customer attraction is the primary objective of e-commerce. It is in this context that the web performance of a site becomes essential, to emerge on its market.
Web performance, what are we talking about?
What is a fast or slow site? What criteria are used to judge the performance of a site? Indeed, the answers to these questions may seem subjective. This is why it is necessary to question the reasons that push a user to want to optimize the performance of their e-commerce, and the criteria for evaluating it.
The increase in sales on an online platform is the major reason. Thus, taking an interest in customer expectations is essential. According to studies, it appears that (desktop and mobile browsing):
- 75% of users are sensitive to page loading speed;
- 66% of customers expect to easily find what they are looking for on e-commerce;
- 61% of Internet users want the site to be mobile-friendly;
- 58% expect the site to be easy to use;
- Only 25% of users consider the design of the site as a criterion for the quality of their experience.
Thus, the loading speed of e-commerce pages represents the most important performance criterion of a site for three quarters of Internet users.
The performance of your Magento site for a positive customer experience
Why is e-commerce performance a necessity for a company’s activity? The answer lies in several points forming the virtuous circle of a successful user experience :
- improving the conversion rate, a visitor satisfied with the performance of your e-commerce is more likely to convert and become a customer;
- the loyalty of your customers, who will be less tempted to go to the competition if they are satisfied on your site;
- increased organic and qualified traffic, as satisfied customers leave positive reviews and recommend your e-commerce;
- increasing your e-commerce sales, for all the reasons above, thanks to engaged and loyal customers.
The performance of an e-commerce is therefore based on:
- its loading speed, knowing that more than half of users do not wait more than 3 seconds for a page to load;
- on the quality and relevance of your content (product description);
- and on the natural SEO referencing of your e-commerce on search engines (ease of finding your site on the internet).
A study conducted by Amazon shows that every second saved in loading a site represents a gain of 10% in additional turnover, hence the growing questioning of Magento users to know how to improve the performance of their e-commerce .
Core Web Vitals in the performance of your Magento site
Since 1998, Google has embarked on a crusade to rank sites according to their relevance and accessibility, and this in a concern for user satisfaction. User experience is therefore the watchword of the American giant, the most popular search engine in the world. Since then, Google has continued to develop its algorithm for ranking sites in search results according to certain classic UX criteria, such as the quality of a site’s content, netlinking, adaptability to mobile browsing, security, etc., but also by new performance indicators in terms of user experience.
Indeed, Core Web Vitals , or “Essential Web Signals,” are now part of the search engine algorithm signals. These new indicators measure the interactivity of the site, the display speed of a page, and its visual stability, and are more oriented towards mobile consultation:
- LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, to estimate the loading performance of a web page, corresponds to the time needed to display the largest element of the page;
- FID, First Input Delay, to measure the responsiveness of the web page, corresponds to the time necessary for the page to react following the first interaction of a user;
- CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift, to measure page stability, evaluates the importance of layout changes during loading.
But in practice, how can you improve your webperf scores and metrics on a Magento site ?
There are several tools available on the internet that allow you to optimize indicators relating to user experience, a certain number of which are offered by Google itself, such as Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, Chrome UX report, Chrome DevTools, etc.
As we have said, Google is keen to offer quality sites to its users, which is why improving the speed of your Magento site has a leverage effect to increase your sales, but also to optimize your natural SEO referencing on search engines.
However, in addition to the speed of a site, you should know that Google also takes into consideration other criteria specific to the content and its writing quality in its ranking in the results page (URL structure, use of title and meta tags, keywords, etc.). Thus, if your final objective is to increase your visibility on the web to generate more qualified traffic, acting only on webperf indicators is not enough, additional in-depth SEO optimization work must be carried out. Optimizing the user experience with fast pages is therefore essential support for your SEO actions, and more broadly your marketing and sales actions.
Speeding up a Magento site in practice
The loading speed of an online store is the cornerstone of a site’s performance, because it impacts in particular the interactivity of the site, and consequently the user experience (and therefore sales), as well as the visibility of sites on search engines. As we have seen, Google takes into account Core Web Vitals, user experience-oriented metrics, and integrates these criteria as signals in its page ranking algorithm.
Content elements impacting the speed of a Magento e-commerce
There are many factors that can degrade the loading speed of one or more pages as well as the website itself. Among the main causes of the slowdown of an e-commerce, we can note:
- images, numerous on an online store because of the photos in the product catalog, this is potentially very heavy content to load if it is not optimized;
- scripts, essential for the proper functioning of a site since they allow you to offer features such as tracking, A/B testing, chat, search engine, etc., but if poorly implemented, they can delay the interactivity of the pages;
- hosting, if it is not sized for an e-commerce site.
Of course, there are many other reasons that can slow down a Magento site, such as excessive use of plugins or other integrated features, redirects, unoptimized Magento server or CMS configuration, etc. This is why it is essential to do a precise audit of the factors slowing down the site.
Speeding up a Magento site using analytics and optimization tools
Detecting and improving blocking points may seem obvious in theory, but how do you measure the performance of your Magento site and how do you optimize its web performance in practice?
Webperf, a contraction of web performance, brings together all the techniques and best practices used to optimize the performance of a website. To do this, several performance indicators must be taken into account. In addition to the Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS), here are some metrics to analyze:
- TTFB (Time To First Byte), or the server response time;
- FCP (First Contentful Paint) or Start Render, display time of the first element of the page on the user’s browser;
- the Speed Index, loading speed of visible content above the fold;
- TTI (Time To Interactive), the time needed for a page to become interactive in a sustainable way and without latency.
Carrying out an audit of your e-commerce is done using several tools and/or extensions made available to Magento users :
- Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, to obtain a performance score for the pages of an e-commerce site and optimization recommendations;
- the WebPageTest tool, for a very complete audit of the performance of a web page, useful for precisely identifying what slows down a page, it is a reference in the webperf community;
- Dareboost, for an audit of your e-commerce pages according to different criteria (speed, security, UX, etc.).
Some tools offer a set of recommendations to optimize the loading speed of the site, such as concatenation and minification, to group and reduce the size of JavaScript, HTML and CSS files; optimization of heavy and slow-to-load data such as images, using compression tools; data caching to reduce the number of requests between the browser and the server (note that Magento has one of the best integrated caching systems on the e-commerce CMS market), etc.
Finally, you should know that the configuration of the Magento platform may be necessary, because the predefined parameters may not be suitable for your e-commerce, such as the configuration of the URLs of the pages and sub-pages of the site, the integrated minification and concatenation options, etc.
