If you’re consulting this page, it’s because you’re already aware of the need to maintain, and even optimize, the web performance of your Magento e-commerce site, and that you’ve now moved on to the next step, and are looking for information on how to measure the performance of a Magento site.
Auditing a website’s performance is essential, and there are a number of e-commerce auditing tools available. But in reality, measuring the performance of your Magento site isn’t as simple as you might think, since there are so many different solutions and indicators to choose from. So how do you choose?
We’re going to explain the different steps to follow before you start your audit, because it’s not enough to launch headlong into measurement tests without knowing what you want to measure, and for what purpose. Above all, web performance analysis must be considered as part ofan overall strategy.
Define the final objective of your Magento site optimization project
With the proliferation in the number of online stores, the visibility of an e-commerce site on the Internet is crucial to business development. This visibility depends in particular on site performance, since search engines, and especially Google, the leading search engine, use a number of criteria to rank sites on the results page, including :
- page loading speed,
- user experience
- mobile-friendliness,
- relevance and e-commerce authority.
When you consider that around 80% of Internet users don’t get past the first page of the SERP, the challenge for SEO is to be among the very first sites suggested by Google.
There are many good reasons to optimize your Magento e-commerce site, and defining the main objective of your strategy is the first step in optimizing site performance. This is the common thread that you’ll need to keep running throughout your project, because believe us, there are so many web performance indicators that it would be easy to get trapped in trying to correct everything. Prioritize according to your business needs!
The main reasons why users of Magento CMS need to analyze their web performance are :
- increased sales on the online store ;
- to increase their conversion rate ;
- customer loyalty;
- increase organic and qualified traffic;
- optimize your SEO, and therefore your visibility on the Internet;
- understanding user behavior (why they don’t return to the site, why they abandon their shopping baskets, etc.);
- the desire to stand out from the competition, or at least align with it;
- the need to increase e-commerce potential in line with sales trends (e.g., by adding new functionalities);
- data collection for e-commerce divestment;
- information gathering in the event of a dispute with a service provider (e.g. hosting).
Only when you have clearly defined your objective can you move on to the second step: choosing the performance indicators that match your objective.
Defining the web performance indicators required for analysis
Even if a certain number of indicators overlap, particularly those related to site loading speed (Speed Index, server response time, FID, LCP, CLS, etc.), the choice of indicators, or KPIs, must be made with regard to your objective.
There are many metrics that can be analyzed, and you can even create your own, but you can’t optimize them all at once. On the one hand, this would be time-consuming, but it would also make it easier to calculate ROI (return on investment). How can you know which action has significantly increased your sales (for example) if you’ve implemented several at once?
Here are a few examples of key performance indicators.
- Measure your Magento site’s audience: number of visitors, duration of visits to the site, percentage of repeat or new visitors, user demographics (location, gender, age, etc.), visitor origin and origin of visits (social networks, search engine, etc.).
- Measure conversions (when the user completes the expected action, such as making a purchase, consulting an offer, submitting a form, etc.): number of conversions, conversion rate, percentage of direct conversions, average basket, basket abandonment rate, etc., or cost of acquisition.
- Measuring site content performance: bounce rate, number of pages viewed per visit, average length of visit, time spent per page, heat map, etc.
- Measure customer loyalty: percentage of repeat customers, evolution of direct access traffic, number of newsletter subscriptions, etc.
- Measure e-commerce loading speed: Speed Index, speed of display of elements above the waterline; First Contentful Paint, time taken to display the first element of the page on the user’s browser; Time To First Byte, server response time; Time To Interactive, time taken for the loaded page to become interactive in a sustainable manner and without latency, etc.
Define the tools to be used to analyze your Magento site
The final step in setting up an e-commerce performance audit is to define the tools and resources to be used. As we’ve just seen, each objective has its own performance indicators, and you need to choose your analysis tool according to what you want to measure.
It’s worth pointing out, however, that most tools have common indicators, particularly when it comes to analyzing loading speed. However, certain resources are more appropriate in certain cases.
For example, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, free solutions offered by Google, are best suited to the overall analysis of a site’s loading speed, and will give you access to a performance score for the page tested.
You can also observe the performance of your pages in terms of user experience using the Search Console’s Core Web Vitals tab.
WebPageTest, another tool for measuring site performance, offers the most comprehensive data, making it a benchmark for web performance experts.
Another example is Google Analytics Dashboard. This is an excellent tool for measuring your site’s audience, conversion rate and content quality, thanks to performance indicators such as :
- visitor location and demographics ;
- average length of site visit, bounce rate, conversion rate and shopping cart abandonment rate;
- click analysis to study visitor behavior and online navigation efficiency;
- searches carried out on the site’s internal search engine;
- page ranking according to consultation volume…
The Google Analytics platform is therefore an essential tool for working on SEO optimization.
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