Magento web performance improvement: what are the benefits?
Webperf, or web performance, everyone talks about it as the Holy Grail, but few users of the Magento platform really understand its meaning or even its scope for their e-commerce. Selling products or services online does not always mean being an expert in marketing, even less in web performance.
In the broad scope of performance, the web performance of websites refers to the loading speed of the pages of the site, whatever its nature (e-commerce, institutional site, showcase site, blog, online newspaper, etc.), in other words, the time needed for a page to be downloaded and displayed on the users’ web browser.
Any merchant who wants to know how to improve the performance of their Magento site must first understand the issues and, above all, the main advantages. This is precisely what we suggest you discover: why optimize the web performance of your Magento e-commerce, and more concretely the real advantages that you can expect for your user experience and your conversion rates.
Improve customer experience and generate more qualified traffic
You may be wondering why the speed of your Magento online store matters?
You think that your real added value compared to the competition is to sell quality, specialized or rare, or even original products or services, to offer regular promotions, etc., all of this is right, but it is not enough.
Despite the care taken in the design of your site on the Magento CMS, your seriousness and your competitiveness, what makes a visitor become a customer and come back is largely thanks to the user experience lived during their search and their journey on your site.
And if there is one thing that annoys potential customers today, in a world where everything is needed right away, it is the slowness of a site. A web page that takes more than three seconds to load will be closed by more than half of users who will go to another faster site. Admit it, you do it too, don’t you?
Measuring page loading speed has evolved significantly in recent years, and you now have all the keys in hand to offer a quality user experience to your visitors!
- The First Contentful Paint (FCP) or Start Render, which indicate the end of the blank page.
- The Speed Index, which indicates the loading time of elements on the page above the fold (visible part on the screen without scrolling).
- Time To Interactive, which measures the time needed for the page to become interactive and usable without latency.
- Core Web Vitals, the 3 metrics that Google integrates into its algorithm, and which reconcile UX and SEO (SXO) – these are the LCP which evaluates the time needed for the largest element to be visible in the browser, the CLS which evaluates the visual stability of the web page, and the FID which measures the interactivity of the page.
To the question previously asked, namely, “why is the speed of your Magento online store important?”, we can therefore answer: because it is essential for a positive user experience, the benefits of which are multiple :
- customer loyalty;
- customer recommendations to other users (word of mouth, positive reviews on the site or on the web, etc.);
- increase in traffic, and in particular qualified traffic (new customers);
- management of activity peaks on the site, while maintaining loading speed even if traffic increases significantly (sales, Christmas, Black Friday, etc.);
- improved conversion rate;
- increase in company sales…
Relieve technical teams during maintenance times
Thus, optimizing web performance contributes to increasing the business activity and the turnover of your Magento site. You are probably thinking that the daily time spent managing the web performance of your site will overload your marketing team and that they will no longer have the time needed for other ongoing development projects. To this, we will answer: yes and no.
Why a mixed opinion? Because everything depends on the strategy implemented . Indeed, the common mistake is to move towards a one-off web performance improvement approach, while only a continuous improvement strategy is a winning solution, because it allows you to obtain a maximum level of performance in the long term, regardless of the site’s developments (if the marketing teams add third-party scripts, if the creative teams add images and content, etc.). Thus, a continuous improvement of your web performance is the only way to guarantee the speed of your Magento store over the long term. But what can you do if you don’t have the internal resources to optimize performance? Think ” automation and good web performance practices “!
- Adopt a CDN (Content Delivery Network), a set of servers hosted in multiple locations and networked together, allowing the caching of static data from your Magento site on relay servers, to bring content closer to your users all over the world.
- Consider concatenating your resources, to group several files and data of the same type into a minimum of files (JavaScript and CSS files for example), in order to reduce the number of requests between server and browser.
- Minify your resources (HTML, JavaScript, CSS) to reduce the weight of your store pages, by automatically removing all non-essential elements in your code.
- Compress the visual elements (images, photos, etc.) of your store, because the lighter the data, the less time it takes to load, especially on mobile in areas with a weak network…
Note that automating best practices and webperf techniques for your Magento online store also helps relieve your technical teams and supports natural SEO work.
Indeed, fast sites are more easily crawled and indexed by Google than slow sites, a good point for your SEO! Indeed, the speed of a site improves the customer experience, and it facilitates the “Google experience” , or other search engine, because it reduces the work of the Google server for indexing web pages.
As we mentioned previously, managing an online sales site does not necessarily mean being an expert in IT or marketing, which is why, in certain cases (lack of necessary human resources or skills in the company), using a solution specialized in improving web performance can be the right option to implement good practices and tools to optimize the speed of a Magento store, while remaining 100% autonomous on its infrastructure.
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