What plug-ins are available to speed up Magento?
Optimizing the web performance of an e-commerce is essential for its activity and sales. Indeed, on the internet where competition is ruthless, the speed of a site is one of the criteria that most impacts the customer experience. Nothing is more annoying than waiting for a page to load. Result? We close the page and go elsewhere. Suffice to say that for an online store, this is a significant loss of potential customers to the benefit of competing sites.
This is why each CMS support specialized in the creation of sites dedicated to online sales, such as Prestashop, the Woocommerce extension of WordPress, Shopify or even Magento, offers a set of plugins to improve the speed of online stores.
To find out how to improve the performance of your Magento site , and more specifically which plugins to use, let’s take a look at the main extensions that can speed up your Magento online business.
Plugins to analyze the web performance of your Magento site
To speed up your Magento site effectively, you should first determine what is slowing it down in order to define areas for optimization. Analyzing the web performance of your online store is therefore essential. For this, several extension modules exist.
Google, the reference in search engines, and which offers the Chrome browser, offers its own web performance measurement solutions thanks to extensions available on the Google Web Store.
But what is a Chrome extension? These are small applications that are integrated directly into the Google browser, allowing you to obtain performance metrics without having to use specific software. Installing an extension is quick and easy.
When it comes to analyzing the web performance (speed and SEO) of a Magento e-commerce site, Google offers several measurement plugins, such as:
- Mozbar, free plugin for SEO, to analyze data relating to netlinking;
- Lighthouse to analyze the different metrics relating to site speed, among others (the Lighthouse score is taken up by PageSpeed Insights, another Google tool for evaluating web performance);
- User-Agent switcher, simulation extension that allows to analyze the reaction of e-commerce in several environments (mobile, desktop, browsers, etc.);
- Majestic Backlink Analyzer, to analyze the backlinks of the Magento site and those of the competition in order to improve the SEO performance of e-commerce.
Finally, let’s talk a little about the Google Analytics extension . It is not in itself a web performance analysis tool, the interest of this extension being more to study the behavior of e-commerce customers, that is to say its web audience (bounce, conversion and cart abandonment rates, searches carried out on the internal search engine, or even the ranking of pages according to their consultation volume). However, understanding the behavior and reactions of the users of your online sales site can guide, or even inform you on the need to optimize the user experience and loading speed.
Plugins to reduce page loading time
Any business looking to improve the web performance of its Magento store must work to improve its loading speed. Why? Because loading speed and latency play a major role in the user experience . Visitors who are satisfied with their browsing on your e-commerce site are:
- future customers, then loyal customers;
- ambassadors for the company, who promote a good image (positive opinions, recommendations, word of mouth, etc.) and therefore contribute to increasing qualified traffic.
Improving the speed of a Magento store therefore allows the company to increase its sales, but also its natural SEO referencing, because a slow site is likely to see fewer pages indexed by search engines.
So, how, in practice, can you optimize the loading speed of a Magento site? There are a number of extensions and plugins that can help reduce the size and weight of pages for the entire site.
The Magento CMS platform provides access to a set of free and/or paid tools for its users, to lighten and speed up a site, such as:
- the Fasterize Magento extension , to automatically and in real time improve the loading speed of web pages on desktop and mobile: optimization of images, JavaScript, fonts , SEO, cache… including the functionalities of a CDN, performance monitoring and securing your e-commerce site;
- Apptrian Minify, a minification extension, allows you to remove unnecessary or redundant data, but without impacting the browser’s reading of the code (code comments, removal of unused codes, shorter variable and function names, etc.);
- Apptrian Image Optimizer, a plugin to optimize the size of GIF, JPEG or PNG images… using Guetzli compression;
- Defer Parsing of JavaScript, a plugin that can be activated from the Magento Backend, allowing you to optimize the prioritization of JavaScript (the analysis and execution of JavaScript code, present in different places on a page, forces the browser to stop loading the page while it analyzes the JavaScript code);
- Full Page Cache, an extension module that allows you to store the data of a page in a cache, i.e. a temporary memory, in order to reduce the number of requests between the server and the browser, to save time when loading the page. This Magento module can be used in parallel with the Varnish cache, which can notably act as an HTTP reverse proxy.
Although quite complete, Magento’s extension modules may not be enough. To compensate for the limitations of these plugins, it is possible to use external plugins adapted for integration on Magento, or to use a complete frontend optimization solution that ensures all the necessary webperf optimizations.
To assess your performance and know what optimizations to undertake, Google’s Lighthouse and PageSpeed Insights allow you to obtain different scores and speed indicators. These tools also list recommendations to improve the loading speed of each page of a Magento store. For example: reduce the weight of images and photos, optimize code, scripts, etc.
PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse allow you to know, for example, if e-commerce needs optimizations such as minifying CSS and JavaScript, activating resource compression (Gzip, Brotli, etc.), images and photos in new generation formats (WebP, or better, AVIF), improving server response time, reducing the use of JavaScript, etc.
Plugins to improve the SEO of a Magento site
The speed of a site is a signal taken into account in the Google search engine algorithm for natural SEO . But obviously, SEO also depends on other criteria.
Writing content for the web is a real profession with its own techniques. To do this, a web editor uses different strategies, the main ones being the use of keywords, based on the most searched terms and in line with the company’s positioning. He must also ensure a text structure adapted to the reading of the page on a browser, and by the robots that index it (in addition to writing, on the technical level, as you will have noted, the Magento plugin from Fasterize that we mentioned above also allows you to optimize your web pages in order to promote their indexing by Google).
There are a number of tools for SEO, but because Google is the number one search engine used in the world, we can place our trust in the extensions and plugins offered by the company.
The Google Suggest extension, for example, provides suggestions for relevant keywords (search frequency, volume, combination of keywords, phrases entered, etc.) based on the users’ geographic location. In addition, Google Suggest allows you to structure a text or article through the algorithmic determination of users’ search intent (the most sought-after information on a general topic).
Finally, Google also allows you to link its Google Analytics extension to Google Search Console, in order to more specifically analyze the SEO performance of your Magento store. Thanks to the information collected, the management of your natural referencing optimization becomes more efficient.
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