After opening your website for the hundred and tenth time you finally realize that it's slow. A slow website in this day and age is basically saying goodbye to any visitors. Your bounce rate is going to skyrocket!
Magento websites tend to slow down due to a number of factors. Starting from the most basic ones like a heavy load on memory storage from the database of customers to large sizes of images.
Fixing each problem is not a day’s job but implementing these best practices can optimize Magento performance and support e-commerce growth overtime. Below we take a closer look at why Magento websites tend to slow down, how we can find the issues, fix them, and some common practices to make your website run fast and smooth.
Magento Speed Issue
Remember the times when we used to stick to our screens for those jaw-dropping fast and furious scenes? What was it about it? The cars and the speed. It was so fast it wouldn’t let you take your eyes off even for the tiniest second. The same goes for Magento or for that matter, any ecommerce site.
The faster it loads, the more your visitors will stick to it, hence higher chances for sales. Magento’s speed issue is loading times which greatly affects user experience. Once a visitor lands on your website and is unable to view the products or their descriptions, they’ll remember it as a bad experience and from then on avoid clicking on your link. They’ll surely remember you but not the way you want them to. What’s the reason behind these slow loading times? It can be
- Large-size product or website images
- Excessive database queries
- Unoptimized code
- Third-party integrations adding to loading time
Impact of Website Loading Speed on Visitor Experience
Now you might be thinking that after all slow speed is not that big of a problem. But hang on, it’s a big problem.
Increased Bounce Rate
When a visitor reaches your site it shows loading for a good second. Within that second he will likely leave your site. As the visitors lose interest and leave your website, it increases your bounce rate and decreases your SEO ranking. Yeah, that’s a kind of a black hole.
Decreased Customer Satisfaction
If by any chance the visitor shows patience with slow loading and moves from one page to another, he will be greatly unsatisfied. As the problem persists it turns out that your whole website is a bummer and is in serious need of optimization practice to be implemented.
Faster Load Speeds Mean Lower Bounce Rate
Now this metric of time spent on the website tells you if your website is doing what it's supposed to which is to guide visitors to their query to what they are looking for. It will even show you where the visitor spent the most time to let you capture your visitors intent.
Improved Conversions
A website that loads swiftly will bring in higher conversion rates. With an overall good experience, there is a higher chance of your visitors filling in signup forms for newsletters and submitting contact forms. It makes your site more pleasing and satisfactory for your visitors.
How To Optimize Magento Speed?
Now that we know common contributing factors to slow Magento speed, let’s work on optimizing it.
To improve Magento site performance we need to identify the exact issue. For that, you can use Google Pagespeed Insights, a tool that goes through the website and checks key metrics. These include page loading time, when the first thing appears on screen, and how often the layout shifts while loading. You will get an entire in-depth report showing errors and suggesting improvements.
Optimize Server And Hosting Environment
Inadequate server resources and poorly configured servers can make your page slow down. Magento is a platform that requires a lot of resources like RAM, CPU power, and disk space to run smoothly.
Also if you are on a shared hosting plan it further slows down your processing time. Inappropriate configurations can lead to bottlenecks and slow performance. Fixing this involves a series of steps to create an efficient, responsive, and stable platform. Ensure your server has enough RAM and CPU to create a database with solid-state disks with faster disk read/write speeds.
The server configuration should have the right settings for handling connections and optimizing the PHP for performance. In essence, you should ensure that that database is well-optimized, regularly maintained, and uses a hosting platform that is either dedicated or a cloud server to handle traffic surges for query optimization.
Choose The Right Themes And Extensions To Customize
Picking a Magento store theme is about choosing a layout that will appeal to your visitors and present your store as a brand to them. But not all themes will fascinate your visitors, some will load slowly and frustrate them.
It happens as themes are not only beautiful layout designs but contain hidden issues of badly written codes, excessive unwanted features, and unoptimized image assets. Not so pretty after all. Try choosing lightweight themes that serve your business right and are not filled with unnecessary things, if so consider cleaning or customizing it. Make certain that every customization is done by following Magento coding practices and standards.
On the other hand, extensions add to the functionality of your store to set it apart. While these tools are robust, it's very easy to misuse and overuse them. Installing too many extensions will lead to increased loading times and inefficient database queries leading to functional errors.
Keep in mind that the more extensions you add the more code there is to process for the platform, hence only choose simple extensions that are well codded, and have great reviews and support.
Furthermore, you’ll need to scrutinize your site to identify any potential conflicts among extensions and keep on updating them with well-built reliable ones that get done more in less time.
Adopt Database Optimizations Practices
Database is your storage warehouse where your customer history, product catalogs, and all other information related to your website are stored. Over time this gets filled and data retrieval becomes difficult downgrading your operations and performance. A good practice is to regularly clean your storage by removing unnecessary information such as your discontinued products etc.
Another way is to properly index your data for read and write operations. This will significantly enhance query performance as inefficient queries put stress on the database and slow down response times. Reducing the number of database calls means taking advantage of indexing. You can identify such queries by Magento Database Profiler. Once identified, work on restructuring your queries, adding the right indexes, and caching the results.
Establish Effective Caching and CDN
Caching is a technique where servers temporarily store the webpage content which is then quickly presented upon request. This speeds up the page loading speed as Magento stores the entire page or certain blocks of content to present instead of building the whole page again.
Additionally, you can allow browser caching for the browser to locally store files to reduce the number of requests to the server and speed up page loading. This is useful for both static and dynamic content.
CDN is a network of geographically distributed server networks that allow for faster transfer of assets. With a CDN you can work on serving static content fast. By reducing the strain on the servers close to users, you can reduce load time and hosting costs for these resources. On top of this, CDN gracefully handles a surge in traffic.
Update your Magento
Every year the platform works on improving its performance, so not updating it regularly keeps you on the sluggish side. Magento is no different. It rose as a global recognition, integrating PayPal for Magento payment option followed by its first conference attracting hundreds of participants.
Other Magento milestones have been its acquisition by eBay, breaking it into a large e-commerce and then Adobe made the move, acquiring Magento fully and integrating it into their experience cloud.
From then on Magento released various versions of Magento 2 greatly working on optimizing its platform performance and becoming better for its users. Keeping your store up to date will save you from any threats, and your website will be up to speed.
Conclusion
Magento is a well-built and highly functional e-commerce platform. There are various reasons why Magento sites slow down. It can be due to server and hosting issues, heavily loaded themes and extensions, and unconfigured database storage. Magento speed optimization is possible by regularly updating Magento, setting up caching configurations, and choosing the right servers, hosting, and themes. Whatever customization you choose, just make sure it follows the Magento coding rules.
Looking to optimize your Magento website for faster loading times and increased customer satisfaction? Consider our Magento expert team services providing high-quality Magento maintenance, website development, customization, and integration services. Reach out to us and we are more than happy to assist.
