Bertha's Blog: How to Improve Magento Website Performance

Many online entrepreneurs use Magento to set up their E-commerce websites and sell their products. It comes with several features and functionalities that help them to attract online shoppers easily. But, it has some limitations also, such as slow speed, technical complexity (for newcomers), requirement of strong hardware, etc.

At a time when online entrepreneurs expect to increase their sales, improving website performance always seems a challenging job for professional Magento developers. In fact, website loading speed is an important factor when you expect a steady flow of traffic to your site, better rankings in search engines, retaining old customers and increasing your leads. A fast loading speed can help you translate your site’s traffic into sales comfortably.

If you are looking for ways as to improve the performance of your Magento site, then this article is for you. Some steps are detailed below that will help you to make your site a choice of online shoppers:

Magento Website Performance

1. Web hosting for your site

Opting for shared hosting is a decent option when you’re running your blog or personal website. But when it comes to choosing web hosting for your Magento store, you must consider dedicated hosting. In spite of its popularity, Magento is quite slow if you compare with other similar platforms such as Joomla, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Shopify, etc. Don’t worry. You can increase the performance of your site by using a good web hosting service.

You must host your site on a dedicated server. Dedicated servers are much better than shared servers in terms of the availability of resources, scalability, customer support, backup during unexpected server issues, etc. A website hosted on dedicated servers has less downtime and better protection against online threats.

2. The latest version of Magento

Magento developers keep releasing newer versions of Magento every now and then with a number of new features and improvements. Every new version of this platform helps you to tackle various issues much better than its predecessors. Therefore, always switch to the latest version of Magento for excellent performance.

3. Consider localization & internationalization of your store

If you have the intention to sell your products across all regions/countries (just like Amazon), then you need to display your site in multiple languages and support various currencies. It will help you to reach out the wider market in an easy way.

Magento allows you to showcase the same catalogue in several currencies/languages without changing the website for specific countries/regions. As Magento is an E-commerce platform with endless possibilities, you need to make the website by keeping user’s need in mind and offer them the best shopping experience based on their location/languages/currencies.

4. Painless & smooth checkout process

E-retailers work hard to create a user-friendly E-commerce website, add a number of products, maintain a rocking customer service team, etc. But, they still face the problem of shopping cart abandonment.

Many E-commerce websites face higher shopping cart abandonment rates despite taking various efforts to improve sales. Do you know why? It’s primarily because of the complex checkout process. Customers will leave your site quickly without completing their orders if the checkout process is confusing or complicated.

Just have a smooth and easy-to-use checkout process on your e-store so that customers can easily complete the transaction within a few minutes.

5. Make your site light

When you handle an E-commerce website that has a number of products to sell, you need to resize the web pages to increase its speed and performance. Miscellaneous elements such as several images of products, description, content, JavaScript, CSS, tags, etc, make your site heavy.

Just keep the sizes of your web pages small and avoid using big images as far as possible. Compress your site’s images and photos by using image compression extensions. This will make your site faster and improve its performance.

6. Restrict the use of extensions & third-party integrations

Magento extensions and third party integrations help you to meet the increasing functional requirements of your E-commerce store. Using several extensions and redirections on your site can also make it slow, which can result in a sharp decline of visitors, ranking in different search engines, and sales.

It will be good for you to minimize the number of extensions and third party extensions on your site. This will reduce the load on the server and make your site fast.

7. Caching

Caching is one of the easiest ways to reduce the number of database operations and increase the performance of your site. To activate caching on your site, Go to System > Cache Management> – Choose all items – set the Action dropdown to “Enable”, click on the submit button. You can also use Magento extensions for caching your site.

8. Optimize your E-store for mobile devices

The tendency of using different mobile devices for searching contents on the global Internet is increasing sharply. If you don’t optimize your site for mobile devices, then you are sure to lose business opportunities that come from mobile users.

To get traffic and leads from mobile devices, make your site responsive and ensure that users don’t face any problem while accessing your estore through Mobile devices. Even mobile-friendly websites rank well in search engines too.

9. Regular Monitoring

It is an important step to ensure the performance of your ecommerce website. New trends keep taking place in ecommerce business, and entrepreneurs need to change their site accordingly to give the best shopping experience to the buyers.

On the other hand, while operating ecommerce website, you face several issues that can hamper your business and create hurdles. That is why you should take the help of an expert Magento developer and get your site reviewed for possible shortcomings and flaws. Get them removed as soon as possible once they are traced. A regular monitoring of your site’s performance eliminates the chances of massive hazards (such as downtimes, page not found error, product not available, etc,) and enhances the performance of your site.

Endnote

Online shopping is increasing rapidly with each passing day. This gives limitless business opportunities to the entrepreneurs engaged in ecommerce business. But, you need to make improvements in your site to grab the advantage. Follow the above-mentioned tips to improve the performance of your ecommerce website and make them a favorite destination for all online buyers.