How to get a good GTmetrix score with Magento
Website visitors are very demanding when it comes to display speed. So, 100 milliseconds less on loading time can generate up to 8% more conversion rates.
Because loading speed and user experience are crucial, Google has highlighted Core Web Vitals, integrating 3 new UX metrics into its algorithm. User experience takes on a little more weight in the natural referencing of a website and therefore its SEO positioning. For a Magento e-commerce wishing to increase its traffic and turnover, it is essential to improve its web performance , especially since this will have an impact on the conversion rate. Different tools allow you to evaluate a site online: Google PageSpeed Insights, Dareboost or GTmetrix. Here we will look at the use of GTmetrix to improve your Magento e-commerce.
Loading and display speed, and SEO
Available for free and in a paid pro version, GTmetrix is a service that allows its users to audit the quality of a web page . The tool can generally be used to monitor your website and monitor its performance over time. To do this, simply select the URL of a given page and submit it to the online tool. First, you will need to choose the context in which the test will be carried out: the type of browser (Chrome, Safari, Mozilla, etc.), geolocation (hosting and server), internet connection (speed quality), type of device (desktop or mobile, some options are only available in the pro version). The purpose of these criteria is to get as close as possible to the context in which visitors to your e-commerce evolve when they try to access it, or to allow a test in degraded conditions to ensure that as many users as possible can access your services.
Once the analysis is launched, you get a detailed report on the loading of the analyzed web page (loading and display speed). Here, it should be noted that page loading speed and page display time are two different concepts. Display time (linked to the Speed Index metric) focuses on the feeling and user experience. It describes what the Internet user or mobile user sees on their screen based on time. A visually displayed page does not mean that it is fully loaded. Loading is linked to files dealing with the visual (HTML, images, CSS, etc.) of course, but it is also necessary to take into account the scripts and all the resources that allow the website to function, without necessarily being visible on the screen (Analytics trackers, plugins, etc.). A website is not necessarily just what you see.
For example, the TTFB, indicated by GTmetrix, is an important data for your SEO. It is the server response time, and in addition to the Core Web Vitals which evaluate the quality of the UX, Google also takes into account this metric Time To First Byte for the indexing of pages.
As part of a global analysis, to improve your UX, your natural referencing (SEO), as well as your conversions, you can, thanks to GTmetrix:
- evaluate the performance of your site’s web pages;
- establish a comparison of your site with your competition (home page benchmark, for example).
Once your reports are generated, you can explore the metrics one by one and understand the origin of the flaws present on your Magento e-commerce.
Analysis of the GTmetrix report and webperf
Web performance is evaluated using a set of metrics and indicators that allow you to monitor the quality of the user experience of your web pages and their loading speed. The GTmetrix report contains different representations, both numerical and visual, to help you understand what is happening when your pages load.
The GTmetrix score
The first section that can be read in the report contains the GTmetrix grade . This data is relatively recent and replaces the YSlow history and the PageSpeed Insights criteria . GTmetrix has recently been based on the Lighthouse SEO analysis service. The current GTmetrix score in the form of letters ranging from A to F takes into account the loading speed of the page from a user point of view, and the adherence of the web page to good web performance practices according to GTmetrix. A GTmetrix score lower than B increases the risks in terms of indexing by Google .
Web Vitals and Performance Metrics
The new GTmetrix update also includes the Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and an equivalent of the First Input Delay, the Total Blocking Time) introduced by Google.
The “Performance Metrics” section includes indicators accompanied by recommendations:
- First Contentful Paint, its optimal value should be around 0.9s or less;
- Time To Interactive must be less than 2.5s;
- Speed Index, Google’s recommended value for this metric is 1000 or less;
- Total Blocking Time (150 ms or less);
- Largest Contentful Paint (recommended value: 1.2s);
- Cumulative Layout Shift (recommended value: 0.1).
Display speed visualization
In the “Summary” section, you can find a filmstrip (series of images) that allows you to visualize what a user sees when displaying your page on their screen over time.
The timeline/waterfall of the page loading
The waterfall section focuses on the loading of the analyzed page as a whole. It is a visual representation that gives the user of the service the possibility to see:
- the number of requests when loading the page;
- the total weight of the page in kilobits or megabits;
- the total page load time;
- the URLs of all requested files;
- the size of each file on the page;
- the loading time of each file;
- the order in which different files were loaded over time.
Improving UX and GTmetrix score with Magento CMS
By following the various recommendations proposed in the GTmetrix report, you can improve the performance of your website by exploring the following avenues:
- minify style sheets (CSS), JavaScript files and resources (images, favicon, etc.). You can use online tools for this (online minifiers) and opt for new generation image formats (WebP, AVIF) and file formats (Gzip, Brotli);
- implement lazy loading, to only load the files and resources necessary for what is visible in the viewport, rather than loading all the elements of a page;
- sort through plugins or find the most efficient extensions so as not to slow down your web pages;
- check if the servers hosting your website offer good performance, adapted to your needs, by checking the latency, and if necessary by using a CDN if you serve your site internationally;
- improve cache management ;
- better think about the mobile user experience with a Mobile First site.
To implement these actions, you can use the services of a developer, an agency specializing in the Magento CMS. The best is to opt for a SaaS solution to optimize your frontend to boost your performance, for all your users, everywhere, all the time, and over time.
In conclusion, performance analysis via GTmetrix is done as part of a performance optimization strategy, both for loading speed, natural referencing (SEO), and conversions . The goal of this approach is to improve the display and loading times of the pages making up your website. These optimizations help to promote the user experience, but also crawling and indexing by search engines such as Google, and therefore bring more traffic, reduce bounce rates, etc. and ultimately increase sales and turnover. Since
performance and loading speed optimization is technical and must be maintained over time for Magento sites, it is important to entrust it to experts or to a SaaS solution for automating web performance.
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