How to measure the performance of your Magento site
Succeeding in selling on the web is a real challenge for companies: faced with competition and new consumer behaviors, each online retailer must be able to adapt and provide the best possible web experience to its customers . To do this, it is therefore necessary to be interested in webperf, that is to say the web performance of its site in terms of loading speed.
For e-commerce businesses looking to boost their business through Magento site acceleration , it is then a question of carrying out an audit to measure loading times, to analyze visitor behavior or even to optimize the online store by following SEO recommendations.
Knowing everything about accelerating a Magento site therefore involves understanding the importance of analyzing the web performance of an e-commerce site , but also knowing how and thanks to what this analysis can be carried out.
This is what we invite you to discover without further delay.
The importance of measuring the web performance of your e-commerce
Before knowing how to measure the web performance of your e-commerce, it is important to understand why this analysis is important. Carrying out an audit of your online store allows you to clarify the company’s objectives in order to improve its online services and to highlight the technical needs to meet the real expectations of users.
These different needs can be:
- SEO optimization (natural referencing);
- increased traffic;
- improving the conversion rate (visitor – customer);
- optimizing the site to maximize sales.
Analyzing the web performance of an e-commerce site allows us to better understand the levers that will enable us to offer a quality user experience for all visitors, regardless of their device, browsing conditions, browser, etc. The quality of this online experience determines their engagement and the possibility that they convert.
75% of Internet users say that it is essential for them to be able to access the object of their search quickly and easily. Thus, the loading speed of a site’s pages or the adaptability of e-commerce to all formats (computer, mobile phone, tablet, etc.) is essential. A site taking more than 3 seconds to display inevitably scares away the majority of Internet users (Google study).
So, when auditing the performance of an e-commerce site, several elements related to the customer experience will be analyzed, and they can result from the loading speed:
- the bounce rate;
- the time spent viewing web pages;
- the add-to-cart rate;
- the shopping cart abandonment rate;
- the conversion rate…
The entire user journey will be analyzed to allow an e-commerce site to measure its performance and thus detect areas requiring improvement. For example, if the loading speed is poor, customers who were about to validate their cart may abandon it if they are frustrated by waiting too long to be able to check out (navigation difficulties represent nearly 20% of the causes of cart abandonment). To avoid these cart abandonments, or more generally to cause frustration among users, the web performance of an e-commerce site must be optimized. Automating these optimizations also saves time, increases their impact tenfold, and also maintains them over time without having to repeat them each time the site evolves (this is the advantage of the Fasterize engine).
3 Important Factors to Consider When Measuring the Web Performance of a Magento E-commerce
To measure the performance of their Magento e-commerce , online merchants have different options:
- carry out their own audit using tools integrated into Magento or other tools available on the internet;
- request internal resources to carry out this mission;
- call on the services of experts specialized in performance auditing, optimization and acceleration of e-commerce.
It is also possible to perform an overall performance measurement or to focus on a specific area, for a specific analysis of the online store’s performance. Here are 3 factors that can be analyzed.
Information related to the user journey
As we mentioned above, the user journey is a very good way to analyze the health of an e-commerce site. The audit focusing on this factor allows us to highlight the good and bad performances of a merchant site.
The most widely used tool for analyzing the user journey is Google Analytics . It allows you to measure the performance of all types of websites, including Magento e-commerce sites. Google Analytics takes into account the features of online stores under the Magento CMS by offering:
- to carry out an analysis by device type (computer, smartphone, tablet, etc.);
- to segment visitor profiles;
- to model traffic flows.
You can also analyze the performance of your e-commerce pages using a heatmap. The latter allows you to visually represent the navigation path of Internet users within the same page. The least visited areas can be optimized by updating the content, offering a new interface, improving the design, etc.
The display speed of the online store
The loading time of a website’s pages is also a key factor to analyze to measure the performance of an e-commerce. The maximum waiting time for a page to load should not exceed 3 seconds: not only will the majority of visitors have already left, but you should know that Google will more easily index sites that it can browse quickly.
Therefore, paying attention to the loading speed of your online store pages is essential to continue to be visible on the web and to promote your natural SEO referencing. This loading speed must be as fast as possible, whether from a computer or a mobile device. Indeed, more and more consumers browse and buy directly from their smartphone, and the browsing experience must therefore be perfectly fluid.
It is possible to perform speed tests to measure the loading speed of your e-commerce pages. These tests allow you to learn about webperf metrics such as Speed Index (display speed of elements in the viewport), Time To First Byte (TTFB, server response time), Start Render (indicator that marks the end of the blank page), Time To Interactive (TTI, time it takes for a page to become sustainably interactive)… and of course, Core Web Vitals, these metrics that reconcile UX and SEO.
To analyze the performance of a Magento site by focusing on loading speed, it is possible to use tools such as PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Dareboost or even WebPageTest…
Natural SEO referencing of a Magento e-commerce
Even if an e-commerce provides a pleasant user experience and its web pages display quickly, one last factor is essential for a site to be successful: its visibility.
Sales of an online store will not be able to take off if the site does not benefit from good visibility. Depending on the sectors, competition can be tough on the web. Merchants must be able to stand out. For an e-commerce to be visible on the internet, it must then think SEO friendly. In other words, an e-commerce must respect the rules of natural referencing.
Good SEO mainly requires:
- good indexing of web pages, favored by the presence of Title tags, meta description, H1, H2, etc.;
- good quality of text content (keywords, alt tags, etc.);
- good quality netlinking (quality external links pointing to the merchant site).
Carrying out an SEO audit then allows you to improve the optimization of e-commerce in order to remain well positioned in search engine results. To analyze the SEO aspect of a website, tools such as Semrush or Lighthouse will be very useful.
To learn more about this subject, please consult our detailed page: what are the KPIs reflecting the performance of a Magento e-commerce?
What tools should be used to measure the web performance of a Magento e-commerce site?
If you want to carry out the study of your performances directly by yourself, some tools (some free and others paid) exist. These tools allow in particular to measure the Core Web Vitals, that is to say the Essential Web Signals according to Google, which are the display speed of the main element on a page, the visual stability or even the interactivity.
Evaluate your web performance using PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is a tool developed by Google. It allows you to measure the display speed of a web page, but it also offers the possibility of detecting elements that slow down loading. Thus, PageSpeed Insights provides recommendations to improve the loading speed of web pages.
PageSpeed Insights offers a score : it must be at least 90 to be considered efficient by Google (between 50 and 90 the site requires corrections, and below 50 the performance is considered poor).
Measure your web performance with Lighthouse
Lighthouse is a free tool also developed by Google. Just like PageSpeed Insights, it allows you to analyze the performance of a site based on different scores (loading speed, SEO, Accessibility, etc.). Lighthouse indicates the failing points and suggests solutions for improvement.
Lighthouse’s strong point : it can be directly integrated as a module to perform automatic analysis. The data is also accessible from Chrome DevTools.
Identify slowdowns with GTMetrix
Still concerning the loading time so important for the web performance of an e-commerce, it is possible to use GTMetrix, a simple to use tool.
This tool will help identify elements to optimize on the website to promote rapid display. The points of improvement are classified according to the importance of their impact on page performance.
The tool also provides recommendations for:
- reduce the weight of images;
- reduce the number of requests per page;
- optimize HTML, CSS and JavaScript files.
Want to go further and discover other tools that will allow you to measure the performance of your e-commerce? Discover 6 essential tools for measuring the web performance of a Magento site .
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