As the digital landscape continues to evolve, the demand for robust and efficient web platforms is greater than ever. For businesses operating in the e-commerce sector, a platform that offers scalability, flexibility, and high performance is not just a necessity; it’s a competitive edge. Magento, a standout in the world of eCommerce platforms, is the top pick for countless businesses thanks to its rich features and flexibility.
However, to truly unlock the potential of Magento, it’s crucial to understand and master its core vitals. These vitals, which include elements such as Content Delivery Network (CDN) usage, specialised hosting, site design, code optimisation, and keeping your site up-to-date, play a significant role in enhancing the interactivity and stability of your Magento site. This, in turn, leads to improved overall performance and a better user experience, both of which are key drivers of online success.
Keeping that in mind, this blog post will provide you with valuable insights and practical tips on how to leverage Magento’s core vitals effectively. This guide is for both seasoned Magento users and the ones who are just starting out. If you want to master how to boost your site’s performance, let’s explore the world of Magento optimisation with us.
First lets take you through an example of a project where we improved core web vitals: Insulation Point
For this specific project our team implemented varnish cache to reduce the load on the server and improve the time to first bite.
We made use of Magento’s critical CSS feature where it injects minified critical CSS inline in the <head>.
This provides two main benefits.
- Eliminated render-blocking CSS resources. As a result, the time for loading render-blocking resources decreases substantially.
- The first meaningful paint time improved.
We optimised the images by resizing them and converting them to a webp image which brought the size down and this lead to an almost 40 point LCP jump across the entire site and resulted in increased engagement and conversions. We also implemented lazy loading on the images to help improve the CLS scores. This made the website feel significantly faster to browse.
Understanding CDN and its Impact on Magento Performance
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers distributed across the globe, designed to rapidly deliver static assets such as images, stylesheets, JavaScript, and other files that make up your website. As opposed to serving content from a single server, a CDN caches these static assets on multiple servers, allowing them to be served to your users from a server that’s physically closer to them. This greatly reduces latency and improves page load times.
Fastly and Cloudflare: Top CDN Providers
Fastly and Cloudflare are two leading CDN providers popular among Magento store owners. Both offer a range of features that can enhance your site performance:
- Fastly is an edge cloud platform that provides CDN services along with additional features like real-time logging, instant purging, and real-time performance insights.
- Cloudflare is an all-in-one solution offering CDN features, enhanced security, and optimisation tools to improve performance and protect your site from DDoS attacks and other threats.
Each platform has its merits and unique offerings, so exploring their specific features, pricing tiers, and customer support options will help you make an informed decision that best suits your needs.
Benefits of using Fastly and Cloudflare
- Faster page load times: Thanks to reduced latency, your customers will enjoy a more seamless browsing experience.
- Improved server response times: CDNs absorb web traffic surges, reducing the load on your origin server and preventing slow response times during peak periods.
- Enhanced SEO rankings: Google rewards fast, responsive sites with higher search rankings, leading to increased organic traffic.
- Reduced bandwidth consumption: By offloading static assets to CDN servers, the bandwidth consumption on your main server decreases, potentially lowering your hosting costs.
The Role of Specialised Hosting
Like CDN, dedicated hosting platforms also play a vital role in your Magento store’s performance and stability. By establishing an optimised hosting environment, you can:
- Improve loading times and overall site speed.
- Reduce server downtime, enhancing stability and user experience.
- Better manage traffic spikes during peak periods.
Cloudways: Supercharging Your Magento Site
Cloudways is a popular hosting platform designed for enhancing the performance of various platforms, including Magento. Here’s how it helps:
- Optimised Stack: Cloudways offers an optimised infrastructure stack that includes Varnish, Nginx, Apache, and Memcached, resulting in exceptional performance.
- Auto-Healing Servers: In the event of server issues, Cloudways’ auto-healing feature automatically restarts malfunctioning services, minimising the risk of downtime.
- Scalability: With their pay-as-you-go plans, Cloudways allows quick and easy scaling, ensuring that your site remains stable even during traffic spikes.
- Security: Cloudways offers dedicated firewalls, regular security patching, and free SSL certificates out-of-the-box to keep your Magento store secure.
Simplifying Design for Enhanced Site Speed
A critical aspect of mastering Magento Web Core Vitals and improving your site’s performance is simplifying the design. The importance of website design in site speed cannot be overstated, as it directly impacts user experience and search engine ranking.
Why Website Design Affects Site Speed?
The design of your website plays a significant role in how quickly the pages load. Complex elements, numerous images, and excessive use of animations may look visually appealing, but they can drastically slow down load times.
Google now considers site speed as one of the ranking factors in its search algorithm. Therefore, a slow Magento site not only affects user experience but also has a negative impact on your site’s SEO and visibility.
How to Simplify the Design of Your Magento Site
Here are some practical tips for streamlining your Magento site design:
- Use a minimalist design approach: A clean, minimalistic design with fewer elements allows your site to load faster and ensures a smoother user experience.
- Optimise images: Compress images and use proper dimensions to reduce their file size without compromising on quality. This will speed up page load times considerably.
- Lessen the use of custom fonts: Custom fonts look stylish, but they can delay page rendering. Stick to web-safe fonts or use a minimal number of custom fonts if necessary.
- Combine and minify CSS and JavaScript: Combining and minifying these files will reduce the number of HTTP requests, thus improving your site’s load time.
- Implement lazy loading: Lazy loading allows images and other elements to load only as they appear on the user’s screen. This can significantly improve page load times as users scroll through your site.
Optimising the Code
Code optimisation is the process of refining your site’s codebase, making it more efficient, lean, and effective. This technique ensures that your site runs smoothly and loads faster, providing an optimal user experience to your visitors.
Here are some essential steps that you should consider when optimising the code of your Magento site:
- Remove unused or unnecessary code, such as redundant extensions, unused themes, and outdated scripts.
- Minify JavaScript, CSS, and HTML files, making your site’s scripts and stylesheets smaller and more effective.
- As discussed before, implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed up the delivery of your site’s assets across the globe.
- Enable Magento’s built-in caching features, allowing the browser to store a cached version of your site’s content, reducing server requests and load time.
- Clean up your database by optimising tables and removing orphan data.
Like other Magento Web Core Vitals, optimising your code also ensures that your site is responsive, adaptable, and capable of handling sudden spikes in traffic. It also guarantees the stability of your site by reducing the chances of server crashes, timeouts, and security vulnerabilities.
Keeping Your Magento Site Up-to-Date: Why and How?
Outdated Magento versions can negatively impact your site’s performance and security. Updating your site provides the following benefits:
- Improved performance: New updates often come with performance improvements, faster load times, and optimised code.
- Enhanced security: Updates often include critical security patches, keeping your site and customer data protected.
- Better compatibility: Stay current with changing technologies, ensuring you have the latest features and improvements.
- Access to support: Older Magento versions may lose technical support, potentially leaving you stranded when issues arise.
How outdated Magento versions can affect site performance
As outdated versions don’t have the latest optimisations and bug fixes, they may result in slower load times and a subpar user experience. Additionally, if your site relies on third-party extensions, these might not be compatible with outdated versions, causing issues such as downtime, poor website performance, and lost sales.
Steps to keep your Magento site up-to-date for optimal performance
Here are some recommendations to ensure your Magento site stays updated:
- Regularly check for updates: Keep an eye on the latest Magento updates and be prepared to implement them when released.
- Test before updating: Before applying updates, ensure you test them thoroughly on a staging site to verify compatibility with existing extensions and the overall site functionality.
- Leverage a maintenance plan: Consider investing in a maintenance plan, which includes routine updates, ongoing support, and emergency assistance as needed.
- Keep backups: Regularly back up your website data, including database backups and file backups, to prevent any data loss during the update process.
Mastering Magento Web Core Vitals: Final Words
Mastering Magento’s core vitals is a journey that requires patience, practice, and continuous learning. We’ve delved into various aspects like CDN usage, specialised hosting, design simplification, code optimisation, and the importance of keeping your site up-to-date. Each component plays a crucial role in enhancing your site’s performance and providing an outstanding user experience.
But remember, the digital landscape is ever-evolving and so is Magento. Stay curious, keep exploring, and don’t hesitate to experiment with new strategies. The most successful eCommerce platforms are those that adapt and evolve with changing times and technologies. Are you seeking assistance with Magento and optimizing Web Core Vitals? Reach out to a Magento development firm for expert guidance in assessing and enhancing your website performance. We hope this guide serves as a valuable resource on your path to mastering Magento. Here’s to achieving superior performance and driving your online success to new heights!
