In case of a Magento eCommerce store, loading time of webpages is very crucial. The speed of the website is directly proportional to its sales. A website that renders in less than 3 seconds has better chances of making conversions. Having an eCommerce store that lists 1000s of products will not be able to do well if its loading time is quite low.

The reputation of the website gets affected by the website loading speed. The visitors will not be much patient and will leave the site if it takes more time to render. They will start looking for alternatives that offers them enhanced user experience.

Page load speed has always been a priority factor for Magento store performance. Over the years its requirements have been changing and getting stricter. Magento store optimization is carried out by Magento development companies to help businesses have better performing Magento stores and improve their sales in the process.

Before you get deeper into Magento performance optimization, just understand that speed and revenue go hand in hand. The faster your website loads, the more sales you would make.

Even the big eCommerce giants like Walmart and Amazon have understood the importance of website speed and knows that they can have increased revenue of 1% if the speed increases by 100 milliseconds. For such big giants, even an increase by 1% means higher revenue. In short, if you are able to decrease the speed by 1 second, it will reflect in your sales numbers for sure.

This means your business needs to implement performance tuning for your eCommerce store to improve sales. Magento development agency like Mage Monkeys can help you with the task. It can be accomplished by optimizing a few things like:

• Hosting

Hosting influences the server-side performance of the website. The weight of the websites on the physical servers and the way the servers are loaded, decides the time taken to generate a page. The website performance degrades as hosting resources declines and this leads to slower load time. Again, issues with hosting can lead to longer downtimes and this means loss for business in terms of their current and potential consumers.

Solution:

Here at Mage Monkeys, we understand that Magento stores need to have reliable and powerful hosting that can take high loads during the busiest days of customer traffic. So, our Magento performance optimization starts by assessing your current hosting provider and the hosting plan. Generally, it is not preferred to have shared hosting for your Magento store. If your online store is huge, then you will need hosting that is fast and powerful rather than a regular shared one.

In some cases, upgrading your hosting plan will be enough, while in case of others, you will need a dedicated server to improve the performance of your online store. We will suggest you the right solution based on your current business scenario and implement the same on your behalf.

• Caching

Another important feature of Magento optimization is caching. Cache is actually a temporary memory stored to speed up the delivery of information requested by the user. This way the issue faced due to the slow data access can be resolved to an extent. Cache displays the frequently needed information (of any kind) on the website this way the whole page does not have to reload when a visitor comes back to your website.

Solution:

Our developers can help you with using Full Page Cache. It is one of the most popular Magento site speed optimization tools. We will enable FPC on your website from the admin panel. This way it will become possible to retrieve information from the server and display it within a few milliseconds on the page. Thereby your visitors will be able to view pages faster.

We strongly recommend FPC should be enabled for your online store. So, when repeated requests are made for a website, there will be no need to collect all the information and display it from scratch. FPC will remember the page and thus speed up the page displaying process. For visitors, they will quickly find what they are looking for and this means better user experience and higher conversions.

• CDN

CDN or Content Delivery Network is actually a network of servers connected together to deliver content quickly. This means the information is distributed all over the network and can be accessed from any part of the world using the Magento website. If your customers are scattered all over the globe then it would be good to improve the Magento performance using a CDN. The performance of CDN is very crucial for the special shopping days for eCommerce business like Cyber Monday, Black Friday, etc.

Solution:

Here at Mage Monkeys, our team will enable it for your online store. Therefore, all the resources will be available on the network at the place where your potential customers are. This way when the user accesses your website using their device, the CDN will look for the closest server and move all the files on to it to let the user find them during their browsing. This decreases the response time of the server and eventually the speed of your website. This means users will stay on your site and keep buying more.

• Third-party extensions

You get to add in enough custom features to your Magento store for enhanced functionality. You can make use of third-party extensions to keep on expanding the functionality of your online store. However, a new HTTP request is added to the server with each new feature. This means more time will be required by the server to process all such requests and this will affect the speed of the website badly.

Again, any unverified or poor-quality extensions used in the website will conflict with each other or some modules present in there. This act will lower the performance of your website as well as affect the future speed optimization steps.

Solution:

With large number of third-party extensions available out there, eCommerce stores are tempted to use them to add in new features. Our team will take care of the task of integrating the required third-party extensions into your eCommerce store. Many Magento stores have large number of such extensions installed that are either not good in terms of store performance or not used at all. We avoid that situation for you by only choosing the ones that works in your store’s favour.

This is where our Magento optimization service proves to be quite valuable. We will check your store for any third-party extensions that has remained unused for long. We know that you don’t want to slow down your website and reduce its performance for the users.

In case you have an extension that slows down the website but fulfils an important functionality then our team will have a custom extension build for the same requirement. This step will help you improve the overall performance of your eCommerce store and offer excellent customer experience. This step will help you increase the conversion rate on your website.

• Unoptimized images

To represent your products well on the eCommerce store, image scaling and optimization are necessary. The importance of images is now high as failure to use high-quality images will lead to low or no sales. At the same time, you will observe slow performance for your Magento store when you make use of heavy images. This means it is important that you optimize the images on your eCommerce site and use quality visuals for faster performance.

Solution:

We know that online Magento stores like yours are bound to have hundreds of visuals and images that includes product images, banners, and others. Such images are used by the store to attract the target audience. With time new images will be uploaded on the website and this means chances are high that website performance will be affected followed by decline in sales. So, we work towards applying few techniques to improve the speed and the same has been explained below:

Control image sizes

We don’t create images that are very small or large. We follow the standard sizes and ensure that the image size does not go more than 1920px high and 1200px wide for your Magento 2 store. Moreover, we avoid using poor resolution images in your store as it will appear blurred. Such images will not work well in terms of attracting your customers.

Compress images

We follow below of the options to compress images without losing its quality.

The images uploaded on the store are optimized using Magento 2 extensions like Potatocommerce or Apptrian.

We use Google PageSpeed Insights tool to run the page test and get a better idea about the image size that can be used after it has been optimized.

We use command-line tools like OptiPNG, Jpegtran, or Gifsicle to compress your images without compromising its quality.

Generate Sprites

We make use of sprite to reduce load on your server through the generation of multiple requests. We do this because a lot of small images like logos, arrows, stars and others are included in the website on its interface. The browser makes a number of requests to the server when you open the website, just to display all those small images. Now a sprite is actually a single image which contains all those small images of the interface in one. So, when we use sprite, a single request will be sent by the browser to display all those interface images.

Make use of WebP images

We make use of WebP to have lightweight images for your online store. This is very important especially when there are lots of images on the site. You will be able to have images that are 30% lighter when you change its format to WebP from JPEG and by 26% lighter compared to PNG. In order to convert your images into WebP we either make use of Adobe Photoshop or online services like WebP Converter, Online Convert, Egzif along with pre-installed plugin like AdoveWebM and Telegraphics.

• URL redirects

Using redirects are important in certain scenarios. In case you change the address of your page you will need redirects to let the servers know about the same. You can avoid 404 errors by using 301 redirects in such scenarios. 301 redirects can be useful but when it comes to conversions and sales, they are some serious issues. For a website, 301 redirects increase the round trip time and also the time HTML take to load will increase too.

Redirects affects the website performance along with its negative influence on Time To First Byte. Once the server gets its first 200 OK response, the TTFB issue gets fixed. Directly your Magento site will not face slow performance due to redirects, but they lead to some other issues. TTFB is considered as one of the important performance factors for websites by Google. So as the performance of your website improves you will get better positions on the search results. This means TTFB optimization for Magento store is crucial and you can choose Magento performance optimization service like ours for the same. The better the website response time will be, you will be able to experience better sales.

Solution:

We understand that optimizing your redirects is important. Now it is not possible to get rid of redirects completely so we follow the recommendations of Google to minimize them. Today server response time less than 200ms is accepted. So, in case we find that your website takes more time to respond then we work towards minimizing or removing redirects. Now this step is very important because your visitors will not be always patient and such slower response time can have bad effect on your online sales.

• Server requests

Other factors that slow down your online store is the number of HTTP requests made and the server response time got. The server request time gets longer with the increasing number of requests and this means it will take more time for the website to load completely. The kind and amount of content that is expected to load on the page will decide the number of server requests. Separate HTTP request is created for every element on the page including JS and CSS file and pictures.

Solution:

When it comes to optimizing the performance of Magento sites, reducing server requests is considered to be a crucial one and we can easily help you with it. The lesser requests you have, the better speed your website will have, as your server will take less time to process. So, we reduce the server requests by combining JS and CSS files, using CSS sprites, optimizing codes, using fewer fonts, etc. Visitors will find your online store good to use if they find that it is quick to load and this means more business for the store.

• Unoptimized codes

Website may have buggy codes at many places. We review the codes regularly and fix those errors. We have a team of Magento developers working dedicatedly for store performance optimization by rectifying errors. We follow manual methods as well as use tools to optimize Magento stores.

Better performing Magento store will be easy for the customers to use and admins to take care of. The ease of use will keep the customers engaged on the store for more time. This means there will be better chances of increasing conversions, thus boost business sales!

When you choose Mage Monkeys for your Magento store performance optimization you will be able to ensure your online store works optimally and makes the buying process smooth for the customers. This will naturally lead to more sales and profits for the eCommerce store.