HOW CAN A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK BENEFIT MY MAGENTO SITE?

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When your customers shop on your Magento site, they are actually accessing a website hosted on a physical server at a single geographic location. The majority of your customers are likely accessing these sites from entirely different geographic locations. Speaking in terms of performance, this presents a challenge to delivering a consistently excellent experience to all your customers regardless of where they are located. This is due to latency; the customers located closer to the server will have better performance than those further away.

The farther your customers are from your servers, the longer they must wait for your site to be usable. In today’s world of mobile customers, fierce competition, and Google’s “three-second rule”, you need a way to deliver your content and products quickly regardless of location.

To combat these delays, you can implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for your Magento site. A CDN is a service that you subscribe to and then configure your Magento site to leverage. The use of a CDN serves your site’s static content and files to your customers from the closest of many geographically dispersed “Edge” servers. A good CDN has a network of “Edge” servers geographically dispersed across the globe.

Setting up a CDN is a fairly simple process that can offer several benefits for your Magento site. The content files on a Magento site that benefit from a CDN are product images, static pages, style-sheets and JavaScript files. These files represent some of the elements on your site that take the longest to download.  The CDN ensures that your customers that are furthest from your servers have the same great experience that those nearest are experiencing. If you are wondering whether a CDN is right for your Magento site, the important factors to consider are the number of images on the site, the speed of your site, the amount of theme files and the frontend JavaScript being loaded. If you are looking for a CDN provider for your Magento site, we recommend one of our strategic partners, MaxCDN, as they have the support, network, and features to help both individuals and growing businesses.

The health and performance of your Magento site are critical to growing your online presence and business. We invite you to learn more about the Magento Health & Performance Assessment with one of our Magento certified professionals.

4 Pitfalls to Avoid when Re-Platforming Your E-Commerce Business

4 PITFALLS TO AVOID WHEN RE-PLATFORMING YOUR E-COMMERCE BUSINESS

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There’s more than one good reason for re-platforming your e-commerce business. It can allow you to reduce risk, improve flexibility, increase automation, and provide a better experience for your consumers. However, any time you overhaul your system, there are numerous issues that can pop up. Avoiding them is key to ensuring a smooth transition for both your business and your customers. Here are 4 pitfalls to avoid when re-platforming your e-commerce business:

  1. Inflexible Planning: As a re-platforming project grows, you may find over time that the actual needs of the project will change. If you’ve been inflexible in your planning or in the delivery process, then you may have trouble meeting project goals. Make sure everyone is on the same page day by day and week by week when it comes to planning the re-platforming; this will ease growing pains, and reduce risk. Always allow for contingencies rather than setting hard, inflexible deadlines.
  2. Stuffing Your Platform with Features: Once you have a new platform, it can be tempting to redo everything at once. However, staying focused on your end goal will be important for keeping costs down — ensuring that you accomplish what you set out to accomplish for your business, and also reducing risk. Keep in mind that there will be ample opportunity in the future to work with certified professionals in order to further grow your site.
  3. Rushing to Finish: In order to migrate your business from one e-commerce platform to another, many changes are going to have to take place. For small businesses that have existed for several years on or offline, there tends to be a fairly complex existing technology ecosystem that must first be analyzed for relevance and for implementation. It’s worth noting that your new e-commerce solution may fill in gaps your previous solutions didn’t cover, such as built-in responsive web design, or back end automation.
  4. Ignoring Scalability: How well do you understand today’s modern, multichannel marketplace? The reality is that scalability will continue to be an important factor to consider when re-platforming your e-commerce solution. There will be numerous dimensions to consider, ranging from integration stability to API performance. Moving forward without understanding the ways your platform can grow with you will be a mistake. The Magento platform is a great option to look at, as it’s the number one e-commerce platform when it comes to scalability, flexibility and growth.

If you’re interested in re-platforming your e-commerce business, we have experience with migrations from many common platforms, and we have assisted many of our clients in migrating from e-commerce platforms they have outgrown to the Magento platform. We invite you to schedule a complimentary consultation and estimate with one of our certified Magento professionals.

TOP 6 WAYS TO IMPROVE WEBSITE LOAD TIME

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Nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again. Even a one-second delay can drastically reduce page views, customer satisfaction and drop conversions. The website performance, or more specifically, the load time of your website, is essential to providing a great user experience. Here are 6 ways to improve the load time of your website:

1. Avoid the extensions: Every extension added to the system has the potential to impact performance and introduce errors. Before an extension is installed, it should be determined that it can’t be done in native Magento in a creative way and a leaner custom approach isn’t financially feasible.

2. Merge JS/CSS: By going to System -> Developer you can enable merging of JavaScript and CSS. This will reduce the number of requests each page load has to make back to the server and can often make the page “feel” faster as there is less to download.

3. Enable caching: Make sure caching is enabled on your site. This reduces the amount of processing a page has to do on subsequent page loads and lowers the strain on the server.

4. Lightweight pages: It is tempting to put many sliders on the homepage to display products, and this can be a good thing. But studies show if it isn’t above the fold chances are they will never be viewed. Get your customers from the homepage to the products quickly, but don’t put all your products on the homepage. Instead, have a section to feature a product or two and generate content around that.

5. Invest in a CDN: A CDN offloads the static resources (JS, CSS, and Images) from your server to their network that is often times spread out over the entire world. This not only reduces the load on your server but also gets the content to the customer quicker resulting in a page that feels (and measures) faster.

6. Bonus profiling: Target a page or two that needs work and hire a developer to focus his attention on that to identify blocks of code that are inefficient. Many times custom extensions (or customizations) will load far more data than what is needed and slow down the site measurably. Consider hiring a professional to look over and help identify these issues.

The health and performance of your Magento site are critical to growing your online presence and business. We invite you to learn more about the Magento Health & Performance Assessment with one of our Magento certified professionals.