Thanks to a CMS, or content management system, such as WordPress, anyone can now create a website. The same applies to the design and management of an online store, using specially developed CMS such as Woocommerce (a WordPress extension), Prestashop, Shopify or Magento.
With more than 240,000 sites online, the Magento open source cloud platform is one of the market leaders in e-commerce CMS. But with the constant expansion of online stores, Magento users are faced with a new challenge: to stand out from the competition and rank well on search engines. In particular, this requires an optimal user experience and site loading speed.
Why and how to optimize your Magento site? That’s what we’d like you to discover in our guide.
The advantages of using the Magento CMS for e-commerce
What is the Magento CMS? Why choose Magento over WordPress, Shopify, or another e-commerce platform? What are Magento’s features? Every user of an online store CMS has asked these questions at least once.
The Magento CMS accounts for more than a quarter of the world’s online e-commerce sites, including those of major brands such as Coca-Cola, Louboutin, Ford and others.
Every e-commerce platform is designed to meet the needs of its users, but Magento stands out for its flexibility and modularity, thanks to the addition of extensions, plugins and APIs. As an open-source solution, it also allows complete customization of the site and its management interface. In fact, the advantage of using an open source platform is that it’s free to use, i.e. unrestricted, so you can do whatever you want with it to adapt it 100% to your needs or imperatives, such as :
- implement the same functionalities and tools as the competition;
- develop your e-commerce business in line with customer expectations ;
- adjust functionalities as e-commerce activity grows to handle larger volumes;
- a hosting solution adapted to Magento to boost performance;
- benefit from 24-hour technical service and data security…
When it comes to creating and managing an e-commerce site, Magento is a highly flexible tool:
- management of all types of content (text, images, videos, promotional banners, etc.);
- multi-brand management (B2B, B2C, product ranges differentiated according to customer profiles, intelligent pricing, delivery and payment methods adapted to the customer’s country, etc.);
- optimization features and services (Varnish, CDN, Fastly, etc.);
- a customer segmentation function to create and distribute customized content, such as product recommendations;
- tools to make shopping easier, such as instant shopping, wish lists, returns management, etc. ;
- PWA applications for adapting e-commerce to mobile browsing;
- 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…
What’s more, Magento’s multilingual capabilities make it easy to develop e-commerce on an international scale.
E-commerce performance to boost sales
We live in an age in which everything is at our fingertips, or should we say at our fingertips. The notion of distance and time no longer exists. Whereas in the past, we might have been satisfied with the products offered by a shop simply because it was the only one nearby, today, with the Internet, the game is changing.
All a user has to do is enter a query into a search engine to be presented with a wide range of products and services. Online competition is fierce, and attracting customers is the primary objective of e-tailers. It’s in this context that a site’s web performance becomes essential, if it is to stand out in its market.
WHAT IS WEB PERFORMANCE?
What is a fast or slow site? What criteria are used to judge a site’s performance? The answers to these questions may seem subjective. That’s why it’s important to consider the reasons why users want to optimize the performance of their e-commerce site, and the criteria used to evaluate it.
Increasing sales on an online platform is the main reason. That’s why it’s essential to focus on customer expectations. Studies show that (computer and mobile browsing) :
- 75% of users are sensitive to page load speed;
- 66% of customers expect it to be easy to find what they’re 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 site’s design to be a criterion for the quality of their experience.
E-commerce page load speed is the most important site performance criterion for three quarters of Internet users.
MAGENTO SITE PERFORMANCE FOR A POSITIVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
Why is e-commerce performance a necessity for business? The answer lies in the virtuous circle of a successful user experience:
- Improved conversion rates: a visitor who is satisfied with the performance of your e-commerce site is more likely to convert and become a customer;
- customer loyalty, as they will be less tempted to go to the competition if they are satisfied with your site;
- increased organic and qualified traffic, as satisfied customers leave positive reviews and recommend your e-commerce site;
- increased e-commerce sales, for all the above reasons, thanks to engaged, loyal customers.
The performance of an e-commerce business depends on :
- its loading speed, given that more than half of all users wait no more than 3 seconds for a page to load;
- on the quality and relevance of your content (product descriptions);
- and on your e-commerce’s SEO ranking on search engines (ease of finding your site on the Internet).
A study carried out by Amazon shows that every second saved in site loading represents a 10% gain in additional sales, which is why Magento users are increasingly asking how they can improve their e-commerce performance.
Core Web Vitals in Magento site performance
Since 1998, Google has been on a crusade to rank sites according to their relevance and accessibility, in the interests of user satisfaction. User experience is the watchword of the American giant, the world’s most popular search engine. As a result, Google has constantly developed 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., as well as new performance indicators in terms of user experience.
Core Web Vitals, or “Essential Web Signals”, are now part of the search engine algorithm signals. These new indicators measure site interactivity, page display speed and visual stability, and are geared more towards mobile browsing:
- LCP, Largest Contentful Paint, to estimate the loading performance of a web page, corresponds to the time required to display the largest element on the page;
- FID, First Input Delay, to measure web page responsiveness, corresponds to the time needed for the page to react to a user’s first interaction;
- CLS, Cumulative Layout Shift, to measure page stability, evaluates the extent of layout changes during loading.
But in practice, how can you improve your webperf scores and metrics on a Magento site?
A number of tools are available on the Internet for optimizing user experience indicators, some of which are offered by Google itself, such as Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, Chrome UX report, Chrome DevTools…
As we’ve said, Google is keen to offer quality sites to its users, so improving the speed of your Magento site has a leverage effect not only to increase sales, but also to optimize your natural SEO ranking on search engines.
However, in addition to the speed of a site, Google also takes into account other criteria specific to content and its editorial quality in its ranking on the results page (URL structure, use of title and meta tags, keywords, etc.). So, if your ultimate goal is to increase your visibility on the web to generate more qualified traffic, acting on webperf indicators alone isn’t enough: you need to do some in-depth SEO work as well. Optimizing the user experience with fast pages is therefore an essential support for your SEO actions, and more broadly for your marketing and sales actions.
Accelerating a Magento site in practice
The loading speed of an online store is the cornerstone of a site’s performance, as it impacts site interactivity, and consequently user experience (and therefore sales), as well as site visibility 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 MAGENTO E-COMMERCE SPEED
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 an e-commerce slowdown are :
- images, which are numerous on an online store because of the photos in the product catalog, are potentially very heavy to load if they are not optimized;
- scripts, essential to the smooth running of a site, since they enable functions such as tracking, A/B testing, chat, search engine… but if poorly implemented, they can delay page interactivity;
- hosting, if it’s not designed for an e-commerce site.
Of course, there are many other reasons why a Magento site can slow down, such as overuse of plugins or other integrated features, redirects, non-optimized server or Magento CMS configuration, and so on. That’s why it’s essential to carry out a precise audit of the factors slowing down your site.
ACCELERATING A MAGENTO SITE WITH ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION TOOLS
Detecting blocking points and improving them may seem obvious in theory, but how can you measure the performance of your Magento site and optimize your web performance in practice?
Webperf, a contraction of web performance, brings together all the techniques and best practices used to optimize a website’s performance. To achieve this, several performance indicators need to be taken into account. In addition to the Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS), here are a few metrics to analyze:
- TTFB (Time To First Byte), the server response time;
- FCP (First Contentful Paint) or Start Render, time taken to display the first element of the page on the user’s browser;
- Speed Index, loading speed of content visible above the waterline;
- TTI (Time To Interactive), the time required for a page to become permanently interactive without latency.
Magento users can carry out an e-commerce audit with the help of several tools and/or extensions:
- PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse from Google, to obtain a performance score for the pages of an e-commerce site and optimization recommendations;
- the WebPageTest tool, for a comprehensive audit of web page performance, useful for identifying precisely what is slowing down a page, and a reference in the webperf community;
- Dareboost, for an audit of your e-commerce pages according to various criteria (speed, security, UX…).
Some tools offer a set of recommendations for optimizing site loading speed, such as concatenation and minification, to group and reduce the size of JavaScript, HTML and CSS files; optimization of heavy, time-consuming data such as images, using compression tools; data caching to reduce the number of requests between browser and server (note that Magento has one of the best integrated caching systems on the e-commerce CMS market), etc.
Finally, it’s worth noting that configuration of the Magento platform may be necessary, as predefined parameters may not be suitable for your e-commerce, such as the configuration of URLs for site pages and subpages, integrated minification and concatenation options, etc.
