In this digital era of continually evolving technologies with faster processing powers, people have minimal patience in waiting for a website to load. This highlights the need for online businesses to work on the performance of their websites. Moreover, a study by Skilled suggests that around 80% of the online shoppers would shun the website if not satisfied with its performance. Let’s put it in the form of revenue, more relatable to businesses. If you are running an online business with daily revenue of $100K, page response improvement by just one second can fetch you excess 7% revenue. Additionally, the immense SEO efforts put by any business to pull off higher organic traffic might get a push if their website is fast. This is since Google considers speed and performance as important factors while deciding on the search rankings.
How can eCommerce businesses ensure these benefits? Simply hire magento developer for getting the website developed in Magento. Why Magento only? The average order size of Magento stores is larger than another popular CMS. Moreover, the average page loading speed is only 2.6 seconds, superior to its counterparts. This prevents mobile users from spurning your website because around 65% of mobile shoppers go AWOL if the page takes more than 4 seconds to load.
Crucial Factors for website performance and speed
Let us have a look at the factors responsible for affecting the performance of a website negatively. According to Nevina Infotech, the most decisive factors to be blamed for the pace and performance of the website are hosting solutions, caching, external integrations, large files, and the ability to handle queries. Let us elaborate on how Magento can rectify these performance bottlenecks?
Issue #1: Caching
The support for caching is the essence of optimizing the load time for a website. Caching is temporarily storing portions of web documents on the client-side so that when a shopper revisits the website, it is not to be loaded in its entirety. Magento optimizes browser cache usage to store the script files as well as the CSS files during the initial visit of the user. This curtails the downloading time for further requested pages. The latest edition of Magento also supports integration with Varnish page caching, which makes the process even faster. This is because; varnish cache can handle the requests without involving Magento servers. Moreover, the private data which cannot be cached is handled by JSON in the background, which passes the data to browsers asynchronously without interfering with the page loading to provide a superior shopping experience.
Issue #2: Hosting Solution
The selection of a proper hosting solution is of utmost importance in any Ecommerce business. Magento gives the merchant the freedom and flexibility to choose the hosting platform, which ideally should be in proximity to the potential target area to enhance the shopping experience of the customers. The distance of the server from the potential customers can hugely affect the performance and speed of the website. For example, a business targeting the Indian market should hire magento developer in India to keep the dedicated hosting solution in its vicinity.
Issue #3: Large File Sizes
Another major hurdle in the optimization of a website is the gigantic files integrated into a webpage, e.g. high-resolution images. Magento supports minification which is the process of eliminating comments, whitespace, and other irrelevant characters to shrink the size of files passed to the browser. It is done before the requests and in conjunction with caching to make these minified files available to all requests. Moreover, the PHP gd2 library provides compression facilities to Magento websites for reducing high-resolution images’ size.
Issue #4: Dependency on Third-Party Extensions
Too much dependence on third-party plug-ins and extensions for major operations is a recipe for disaster. The external integrations if of inferior quality, can degrade the performance of the website or might conflict with other website features. Magento is a full-fledged CMS developed exclusively for eCommerce business with rich functionality. So, the reliance on external plug-ins or extensions is minimal. Newer companies shall ideally hire best magento developer who has experience in handling external integrations.
Issue #5: Query Handling
The query handling of the platform eventually decides the performance of the platform. These queries are fired while different filters are being applied by a shopper to narrow down his search for the perfect product. The time between the request and the response decides the fate of that transaction. Magento has few enviable features to speed up the query response. One of them is the usage of GraphQL query language that fetches information in small data packets. Lesser API requests lead to lesser data to and forth movement resulting in rapid loading of pages even on slow networks. On top of it, Magento can also handle API requests asynchronously. It means that multiple requests like address validation, cart updates, etc. are not waiting for their turn to be processed. Instead, multiple API requests can be processed simultaneously to perk up the response time.
Conclusion
To summarize, Magento stores are high on performance and speed. But, just using Magento doesn’t suffice the need of optimization. The website should be checked for speed and performance parameters regularly, using tools like Google Pagespeed Insights or GTMetrix. This is especially required when a new third-party plug-in or extension is included. Companies without the requisite technical expertise can hire magento developer online to optimize the performance of their website.