For those of you that weren’t there for last year’s blog post on web performance, titled “What is the Best E-Commerce Platform for Web Performance?“, let me catch you up on the purpose of this little study of ours.

Why is web performance a big issue for e-commerce companies?

Well it’s a simple calculation, really. 😉

“Time is money”, as the saying goes. So for an ever growing economy like the e-commerce business, that amounted to $1,915 billion of worldwide revenue in 2016 (and who will keep increasing by up to 20% each year, in the near future), time truly is of the essence.

And in the e-commerce world, who is the worst enemy of speed (and thus revenue)? Bad web performance.

So you can imagine how most companies, aware of the importance of e-commerce and heavily invested in the field, would want to get the better out of their CMS platform, and achieve a high level of performance and user experience. Simply because if your e-store is slow, customer won’t come / stay / buy, and you’ll have lost a lot of money in customer acquisition / marketing / development / …etc.

Why choosing the right CMS platform is such an important decision for web performance?

Using a CMS to build an online store is a sound tactical choice. It allows you to focus on:

• sales, instead of on the technical aspects of running an online store,
• SEO and marketing actions,
• or even on the finer points of you internet catalogue.

However, using a CMS instead of a custom-made platform for an e-shop is not without consequences:

• By default, it often implements many functionalities that might not be useful, which can make the overall system quite heavy and slow at first.
• It can be more or less prone to bugs, slowdowns or even downtimes; depending on how the CMS is built and customized after installation.

So when it comes down to it, to your speed and conversion rate, choosing the right CMS platform for your e-store is crucial.

And that is why, for the second year in a row, we decided to conduct a study on the performance of 7 leading, well-known, or brand new, e-commerce platforms that seem to be all the rage in 2017. 😉

The idea is to establish a ranking, and find out which one of the platforms delivers the most stable and fastest experience during the classic e-commerce sales funnel.

So without further ado, here is our 2017 competitors pick for the Best E-commerce Platform competition:

• WooCommerce,
• Shopify,
• Magento (we combined the results for Magento EE and CE, but we’ll be sure to do a more thorough blog post on their respective performances later on),
• Prestashop,
• BigCommerce,
• Drupal Commerce,
• and Salesforce Commerce Cloud (former Demandware).

You’ll notice on the chart below, representing the worldwide proportion of websites for each of our chosen CMS, that some in our selection have quite small communities. But we do believe that these CMS present high hopes for the future of e-commerce, in terms of technology, so we’ve decided to test them nonetheless.

METHODOLOGY FOR THIS STUDY

How did we select the websites for the study?

Like for our 2016 CMS platforms study, the study was carried out on a panel of 120 websites (20 per technology), with an Alexa ranking between 200 000 and 600 000. The medium values revolve around rank 430.000, which represents websites with approximately 67.000 visitors/month.

Choosing such a range gives more representativity to the study, since these websites are more likely to meet minimum UX and performance agreed-upon standards.

How did we analyze the performance?

The data was collected using our monitoring tool, Quanta: it reproduces the behavior of a visitor going through the classic sales funnel (Home > Category > Subcategory > Product > Cart), and analyzes the speed and availability of each page from the Home Page to the Cart.

Selected sites are analyzed every minute, 24/7, during 14 days. The tool goes through the main five pages of the website (pages following the sales funnel, ndlr), every minute. And does this for every website selected for the study. This represents a total of 600 clicks per minute, and a total amount of 12 millions HTTP requests for the whole study.

The numbers featured throughout the study are the median values for each page of a regular sales funnel, out of the 20 websites selected per CMS. That is to say that for a better reading comfort, we displayed the median results for all websites, per CMS.

For each technology, we created a summary in the form of an illustration, displaying availability rates and page load times, for each step of an ordinary sales funnel.

Disclaimer. You may notice that the further you go into the sales funnel, the more results are likely to decrease. That’s perfectly normal since the results are added up to each step that follows.

Now, let’s cut the chit-chat and dive right in! 😉

STUDY

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the leading e-commerce platform on the market. Free and easy to use, it works as an extension of WordPress, and thus:

• does not require an external hoster,
• uses the same plugins as the ones for WordPress (ex: for SEO, it’s Yoast SEO),
• has many themes and plugins available to upgrade the stores,
• and is very scalable, making it a good solution both for big and small companies.

But even with all these technical advantages, it’s too early to declare WooCommerce as the ideal solution for performance. That was the case in 2016, and it remains so today.

The performance test shows that WooCommerce is still overly average in terms of availability and average response time (ART).

The average page load time for all monitored stores is 0,63 seconds (s), which is OK, but not great considering that the immediacy threshold, the holy grail of web performance hailed by Google itself, is 100 milliseconds. Plus, out of the 20 tested websites, we noticed a big a gap in the ARTs; proving that WooCommerce is not a reliable platform in its “out of the box”configuration. For example, a cart once loaded in 4,14 s!

However, it’s true that the results are way better than last year’s. The Home Page and the Cart remain big performance bottlenecks, but we’ve seen a 20% increase in speed for these two steps.

For the availability, WooCommerce comes in 3rd in our competition. With its 99,87% availability rate on average (0,35% more than last year), the solution is stable, even if it still represents a 13 minutes downtime every week on average.

In conclusion, despite its great technical advantages and its increased availability and average response time, WooCommerce as it is often set up, can’t be considered a reference in matters of performance. Of course, in some measure, you can overcome its slowness by:

• using a hoster specialized in WordPress and WooCommerce websites,
• using additional modules like WP Rocket,
• compressing big and heavy images,
• or caching the maximum number of elements in your code.

Shopify

The Canadian solution Shopify is very easy to use if you want to launch an e-commerce platform. It was created in 2006, in order to build a complete website in ten minutes, tops.

Shopify is an all-in one e-commerce platform, which doesn’t require any knowledge in development to set up. You simply have to create your catalogue with the articles, texts and images you need for the store. The structure of the website and themes are already provided when subscribing to the solution.

Shopify is not only simple, but also very performant. Again! The data extracted from our study revealed that on average, web pages loaded in 0,35 s, when the Google Guidelines recommend an average of 0,50 s for loading times! Thanks to its fast response times and results, Shopify delivers a very good overall user experience.

But contrary to last year, Shopify can’t be considered the most stable solution. It actually comes in 6th, with its 99,83% Sales Funnel availability (99,95% last year), on average. Of course, this could be explained by the increase in worldwide availability incidents but still, it’s a little bit disappointing for our 2016 Performance Champion. It represents a 17 minutes downtime each week.

Such performances can be explained by the fact that Shopify is a full-Saas platform; meaning that it manages both the CMS and its hosting. This specificity is definitively an advantage pertaining to loading times and availability, but the drawback is that when Shopify’s servers are down or suffer a slowdown, all the websites hosted are affected in the same way. If you want to know more about this subject, I actually wrote a blog post on the impact of the 2016 Dyn DNS attacks on Shopify websites. You can find it here.

Magento

Created in 2008, Magento is an open-source e-commerce solution, with a big and active community, providing advanced user assistance and many dedicated extensions. It is currently the leading e-commerce platform in Europe, with more than 230 000 websites using their technology.

However, to this day, it remains quite difficult to master, due to its architecture and all its functionalities. Skilled developers are often needed to undertake modifications.

During our study, we discovered that, in 2016, Magento has been a rather stable platform since the availability rate reached 99.89%, on average, which is better than 2015’s 99,71%. The availability rate for the Subcategory, Product and Cart steps are way more satisfactory. So it comes in 3rd position in terms of general availability.

Although Magento websites are the most frequented (with an average of 3000 visitors per day), they are not the fastest! The results showed that the pages, composing a classic user’s sales funnel, loaded in 0,60 s on average, which is beyond the “under 500 milliseconds” goal set by Google. And even if the Product’s average response time has been cut by half since last year, it remains far from the racing cars that are the likes of Shopify.

Nonetheless, Magento’s Cart load time is reasonable with a result of 0,58 s; which is fast enough to retain clients until the end of the sales funnel.

In conclusion, we can safely say that Magento is a complex machine, making it slower than the average other solutions.

To improve its performance, try using Varnish, or the built-in Full Page Cache functionality, developed by Magento itself. Those two popular cache systems can really boost you store and help it near the sweet spot of 100 milliseconds, the immediacy threshold.

PrestaShop

Since its public release in 2007 PrestaShop has been a very popular CMS in France. The solution is used by 250,000 websites across the globe, and has a huge community (1 million community members!).

PrestaShop is free to download and install, and provides native basic functionalities. However, in order to have a fully functional website, it is necessary to download themes and extensions in the PrestaShop market, which are hardly ever free…

The analysis of PrestaShop websites’ performance showed average results. The average speed for every page is 0,65 s, with the Cart being the fastest page at 0,56 s. It presents significantly better results compared to last year’s, particularly for the Category and Subcategory pages.

However, PrestaShop still presented a very good (even if a little bit diminished) availability rate of 99,90%, garnering it the 2nd place in our competition for Best Availability.

Those results could possibly be improved using many optimization and caching tools the solution provides, as well as choosing hosting services fitted for PrestaShop, using a CDN and reverse proxy solutions.

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is our second full-SaaS solution. A CMS that we chose to include in this 2017 edition of our study, because of its growing reputation and use by e-commerce companies. Created in 2009 by Eddie Machaalani and Mitchell Harper, following a chance meeting in an online chatroom in 2003, it is tailored for fast-growing, mid-market, companies.

Unlike a Magento or a Drupal Commerce, BigCommerce offers few customization options. There are four different levels of pricing – Standard, Plus, Pro and Enterprise -, that each offer specific features and services. So if you’re looking for a close-to-custom-made platform, BigCommerce is not made for you.

But even if it wears proudly its “Full-SaaS feel” when it comes to customization, BigCommerce is a great choice when it comes to overall web performance.

As you can see on the illustration below, most of the indicators for the Sales Funnel steps, for both availability and ART, are in the green. With its average response time of 0,50 s, BigCommerce is a fast platform. This response time places it in the third position of our competition for Best Average Response Time, and matches exactly the recommendation of Google when it comes to speed.

As is customary for many full-SaaS CMS, it is also quite stable. With an average availability rate of 99,87%, BigCommerce seems to be a valid option for e-commerce websites.

Drupal Commerce

We monitored a panel of Drupal Commerce stores. Created in 2011, Drupal Commerce is an extension of Drupal, adding to the original CMS all the e-commerce features needed by online companies. It is free and open-source.

One of Drupal Commerce’s particularity, is to be really well-fitted for SEO, which allows websites to climb the rankings in Google search engine.

Drupal Commerce was a rather good solution when it came to performance. In fact, the medium for the pages load time is 0,56 s, which represents the fourth best performance out of all the technologies tested, very close to SaaS solutions like Shopify and BigCommerce!

With 99.86% availability rate, Drupal Commerce represents the sixth most available technology among the tested CMS. But even if it seems poor, Drupal Commerce remains a reliable technology to use for an e-commerce store.

However, creating and updating a Drupal Commerce based website is not as simple as using Shopify or PrestaShop. It requires a dedicated team of developers, and thus, to invest some time and money into the setup.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud (former Demandware)

And last but not least, here comes Commerce Cloud. It is a cloud-based e-commerce platform created in 2004 by Stephan Schambach, and purchased in 2016 by Salesforce to reinforce its e-commerce services.

Commerce Cloud was conceived as a full SaaS platform with a touch of predictive technology, that aims at managing all the aspects of an e-business: hosting, marketing, and customer services. As you can see in the “CMS Proportion 2017” chart in the beginning of this study, Commerce Cloud is not a widely used CMS at the moment. But we chose to include it in our study because we do believe that the Salesforce buy will give this CMS nw possibilities of expansion.

That being said, let’s take a look at the results of our web performance test.

If you’ve been with us since the beginning of this study, the results in the graph below should not really be a surprise to you. As a Shopify or a BigCommerce, Commerce Cloud presents overall excellent results when it comes to availability and average response time.

See? Green almost everywhere! Commerce Cloud presents the best overall results in both availability rate and average response time.

The medium average response time is a tiny 0,35 s, with a really fast Cart that peaks at 0,23 s. Yup. That’s closing fast on the immediacy threshold, and are pretty impressive results.

But Commerce Cloud is not only fast, it is also really stable. With its 99,96% availability rate (which represents only 5 minutes of downtime each week), it’s the number 1 reliable CMS platform for this year’s study.

AND THIS YEAR BEST WEB PERFORMANT PLATEFORM IS…

Before unveiling the name of this year Web Performance champion, we thought it was a good idea to look more precisely at the availability rate and average response time results.

As we’ve said before, every e-company is different, and its unique features call for a tailored choice of CMS. Even if web performance as a whole must remain the key factor in choosing a CMS, some businesses will want to focus on availability, or on average response time.

So, here you go. Here are the results for the Best Availability Rate, and Best Average Response Time rankings.

As expected, the full Saas platforms perform well, especially when it comes to the average response times (advantage only possible because they host the websites themselves, instead of employing an external hosting service and communicating with it). And we can also conclude that it is not the most used platforms that presents the most impressive results. Moreover, if you compare these results to last year’s ranking, it cements the idea that CMS platforms, like all technology, evolve throughout the time, and that yesterday’s good results do not necessarily mean tomorrow’s success.

But these rankings are just partial answers to our founding question of “Who is the best web performant CMS platform for 2017?”. So without further ado, here is the definitive podium.

Drum roll please!

We’re pleased to announce that, after taking into account all the datas provided and analyzed, the most web performant e-commerce platform is Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

The study revealed Commerce Cloud websites tends to be faster and more stable than other CMS-based websites. And more broadly, that seems to be the case for the other Saas CMS, like Shopify and BigCommerce.

BigCommerce is also a fast and reliable full Saas solution, garnering it the second place on our podium.

And last, but not least, on the 3rd step of our podium, we find Magento, that represents a safe and good option in terms of web performance. Even if it is not the fastest, or the most available, its medium scores in these two areas makes it a well balanced platform.

Of course, if your site runs under Prestashop, or WooCommerce, there is no reason to be alarmed! The results of all these platforms are very close, and the differences between the different rankings on the podium are often minimal. But we do believe that a little healthy competition can nudge the publishers of these solutions to better take into account the issue of web performance. 😉

Moreover, we observed during the study that significant differences could exist in the performance of sites running on the same technology. It’s just that some sites are better tuned than others. This only reinforces my belief (and the message I tried to get through to you!) that a CMS will never be perfect “out of the box”, and that optimizations to cater to the specific needs of an e-commerce website are absolutely necessary.

LAST WORDS

And this conclude this year Best Web Performant CMS Platform competition!

But here is a little sneak peek at our 2018 edition.

QUANTA’s Head of Operations, Matthieu Rosinski, tested the performance and scalability of Oro‘s new cutting-edge platform, OroCommerce, and the results were very promising! So we can’t wait for next year to come, and hope that we’ll have the opportunity to test the web performance of these  websites. 😉

Remember that the most important conclusion to be drawn is that the technology used for a website is not the only key factor to get good performances.

Relying only on a CMS native availability or speed will certainly lead to poor performance, and numerous issues. So, to get the best performances possible, it is crucial to rely on a professional team of developers, who will be able to maximize website optimization, and improve page load time speed. And this, even for full Saas CMS platform that, even if performant in their out-of-the-box configurations, need fine tuning to push further the boundaries of web performance.

L’article What is the Best E-Commerce Platform for Web Performance? – 2017 Edition est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Last year, Magento announced the release of its SaaS “Magento Cloud Edition” offer, which has since seen its first launched websites.

This year, among all the exciting keynotes (including Mark Lavelle’s on the need for e-commerce to evolve with the desires of the users), 2 major announcements caught our attention :

• The launch of a “B2B” mode, to potentially adapt the site to each user.
• The launch of Magento Social, that aims at linking Facebook with e-commerce platforms.

Photo credit: Agence Dn’D

Magento Digital Commerce Cloud for B2B

Setting up a B2B e-commerce website with Magento was one of the biggest challenges with the platform so far (and some of Quanta’s customers can attest to this). This often required “tweaking” the application by carrying out many expensive and specific developments.

The advantage with this new version of Magento is that you can:

• Easily connect to an ERP (e.g. Sage or SAP) in real-time.
• Customize prices for each group of customers. And we all know that it is a very important specificity of the B2B field; the prices and discounts being very often specific to a customer!
• Automatically edit estimates by offering multiple payment methods, such as bank transfer.

Magento Social

The idea behind Magento Social is to synchronize the information from the product catalog with the social networks, so that you can capitalize on more recommendations (e.g.: “Your friend Anna loves this product … Buy now”) within the existing customer base.

Photo credit : Tom Robertshaw

For example, you can:

• Automatically create paid ads by product.
• Better track the source of the acquisition of a new buyer arrived by a social network, because the information “source: Facebook” ends up being rather vague. 🙂
• More effectively transform followers into customers, which is undoubtedly one of the main stakes of a community manager.

Magento Shipping

Magento Shipping is the little icing on the cake of this presentation of new Magento products. 😉 With this new offer, it will now be possible to connect directly with the carrier services of each country, and with tariffs expected to be competitive since they’ll be pre-negotiated by Magento (oh yeah!).

Crédits photo : Space 48

The advantage is quite clear: shipping to one, or more, new countries will become much faster and easier. Enabling the international growth of all Magento stores!

And that’s it for this overview of announcements made during Imagine!

If you want to know more about the other Magento news, you can check them here.

L’article B2B and Social, the big news of Imagine Commerce 2017! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

It’s time for Quanta to hit the road and fly to Las Vegas, Nevada, for the amazing Magento event: Imagine 2017!

Let us take 5min to review why this is such good news (and why we’re oh so very happy to be going). 😉

Reason 1: Imagine is a reference in terms of international e-commerce related event

Imagine brings together more than 2,500 merchants, partners, developers, and commerce experts from more than 40 countries.

The whole Magento community meets there every year. So it’s a great opportunity for executives, marketers, developers, companies and technology innovators to network, and share the latest tendencies, technologies and strategies in shaping the e-commerce of tomorrow.

For Quanta, it is also a great way to connect with our worldwide customers and partners.

This conference will be one more in a long list of Magento events to which we went. To name a few: Magento Live UK, Bargento, Meet Magento Italy, Magento Live France, Imagine Commerce (we hosted a panel there, blog post here), Meet Magento Germany… and not long ago Magento Live Australia (if you want to read more about Guillaume’s adventures in the land of e-commerce and kangaroos, just click here).

Reason 2: Look at all these amazing conferences and speakers

First thing first, can we take a look at who is delivering the keynote address ? Serena Williams. Yes!

Serena is not only an incredible tennis player ranked Number 1 internationally but she’s also involved with many charities dealing with sports, inclusion, and more importantly, women empowerment. She’s the perfect example for this new generation of strong-willed women that take the world of digital and technical innovations by storm.

On a more serious note, apart from the keynotes, and many forums, we’re really looking forward to conferences like :

• “Optimizing Magento Application Performance in the Cloud and Beyond“, by Beau SIMENSEN, Technical Product Manager at SensioLabs US. Directly striking Quanta’s web performance cord, this conference will take a tech look at the performance optimization tools that come standard in the Magento Cloud Edition.
• “Increasing Diversity in Tech“, by Alaina PERCIVAL, CEO of Women Who Code. This conference will explore the subjects of inclusion, gender equality, and how the diversification of profiles in teams can directly impact the ROI of a company.
• “Sweetening the Deal: Growing with MailChimp’s Multichannel Features“, by Tony SIMON, Head of Strategic Partnerships at MailChimp. This conference is a case study with Gauge Interactive, on how they are using the new MailChimp multichannel features.

But of course, the main purpose behind going to Imagine is to be able to meet new tech entrepreneurs, and to discover the innovative tendencies of tomorrow regarding e-commerce, web performance and optimization. If you’d like to meet us, just send us an email at hello@quanta-computing.com.

Guillaume, Co-founder @Quanta

Reason 3: Well, because there are still too much brands that don’t know how to handle web performance

With the experience of more than 450 e-commerce sites monitored, we made 3 major observations:

• Internet users have become increasingly impatient, making the level of instantness to be reached ever so high.
• The heads of e-commerce have to drive the web performance among many other subjects, all of which are time consuming. Therefore, it is essential for them to have indicators to make the right strategic decisions quickly.
• Too many sites still miss the web performance boat, in piling up the apps they use to achieve it.

Based on these findings, Quanta’s team spent 4 and a half years of R&D to build a tool for brands, web agencies and web hosts, which allows them:

• To analyze in real time the web performance of e-commerce websites,
• To identify, through algorithms, which are the optimizations that have the highest chance of return on investment,
• And above all, to share the right information with all the teams at the same time.

So it is important for us to be at Imagine 2017, to present how leading brands in Europe are now driving their Web Performance with Quanta to e-commerce enthusiasts, and to meet with other disruptive tech teams that have the betterment of e-commerce to heart.

L’article On the road to Las Vegas for Imagine 2017! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

So, taking that into account, it seems to be a good idea to have some little tips to increase the web performance of an e-commerce website. And that’s when this blog post comes in handy.

Welcome to the third (and last) part in our 3 parts series, about the little knacks that you could implement to boost your Magento’s performance!!

This time, we’re gonna talk about 11 back-end tips for your Magento store, but if you want to learn more about the server knacks, or the front-end optimizations, just click on their respective links!

Without further ado, let’s quickly review together this list of back-end optimizations that you can easily implement for your Magento website!

• Install, or configure, different caching systems to avoid consuming too much resources. Good choices are: BlockCache (Magento), FullPageCache (Magento EE), Opcode Cache (PHP), which in its Zend Opcache version is configured by default in PHP 5.5, Varnish (Proxy cache), RAM Cache.
• Migrate your backoffice on another server to avoid performance issues during the connection.
• Disable and uninstall extensions you don’t use.
• Use Magento “Flat Catalog” functionalities to avoid accessing several table in SQL at the same time.
• Avoid using Magento “Layered Navigation” functions since they are energy-greedy.
• Forget about obfuscation (e.g. loncube) in your PHP code: It will open two times more classic files and have a huge impact on your performance.
• Limit the number of products on your front-end pages, which require a lot of requests/server performance.
• Disable Magento logs.
• Activate Magento Cron’s maintenance scripts.
• Use a RAM Cache system for sessions.
• Install a tool like Fasterize or Cloudflare.

Remember that depending on your architecture, your hosting and/or your server, these solutions could bring disappointing results. That is why a monitoring tool could help you to prioritize the best-suited optimizations for you.

But if everything goes according to plan, applying these principles will let you experience a significant improvement in page loading times.

This list, of course, is not exhaustive. But it’s a start 😉 Feel free to contact us if you have any other performance-related tips to share with us!

And check out our 2 other blog post on Magento’s optimizations:

• 14 server knacks to optimize your Magento store’s performance!
• 9 front-end pro tips to optimize your Magento store’s performance!

L’article 11 ways to optimize the performance of your Magento store’s back office! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Today, we’re gonna talk about 9 front-end tips for your Magento store, but if you want to learn more about the server knacks that you can implement, just follow the lead.

So. As we’ve said before, web performance is key when managing an e-commerce website. The speed of an online store is crucial for conversion and SEO, and thus profitability. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again 😉

Without further ado, let’s quickly review together this list of front-end optimizations that you can easily make for your Magento website!

1. 1. Be careful with the order of your assets. For example, Javascript files block the download of the pages. So you should therefore place them at the lowest level possible. Because, even though our navigators are getting smarter, you can always gain some improvements from avoiding loading time.
   2. More requests = more loading time, so limit their number by using: concatenation (Gather your CSS/JS file together in a single file), CSS sprites (thus combining several images into one), parallelization (For this, you can distribute your assets into several domains. But not too many! Calculate DNS lookup time to make sure that you are not working at cross-purposes. Or you can also use a CDN).
   3. Use minification. It reduces the weight of the useless elements of your assets (e.g empty space, comments…).
   4. Use async directives as much as possible for your Javascript files.
   5. Use DNS Prefetch directives to avoid using too much of your browser’s resources.
   6. Delete unused Magento blocks (layout.xml).
   7. Use browser’s cache for static files.
   8. Compress your pictures.
   9. Adapt the width/height/weight of your pictures, in accordance with your users’ connection.

Remember that depending on your architecture, your hosting and/or your server, these solutions could bring disappointing results. That is why a monitoring tool could help you to prioritize the best-suited optimizations for you.

But if everything goes according to plan, applying these principles will let you experience a significant improvement in page loading times.

This list, of course, is not exhaustive. But it’s a start 😉 Feel free to contact us if you have any other performance-related tips to share with us!

And check out our 2 other blog post on Magento’s optimizations:

1. • 14 server knacks to optimize your Magento store’s performance!
   • 11 ways to optimize the performance of your Magento store’s back office! [Coming soon!]

L’article 9 front-end pro tips to optimize your Magento store’s performance! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Web performance is key when managing an e-commerce website. Indeed, as you may already know, the speed of an online store is crucial for conversion, and thus profitability. Customers are less and less prone to wait for a page to load, when purchasing online. Conversely, users are very likely to make an impulse buy if your website is fast, since speed improves user experience.

But it’s not just because of conversion that web performance should be a main focus point of yours. There is also the little matter of SEO that has to be taken into account. Indeed, Google takes into account your website’s speed to build its index: the fastest your website is, the more likely you will be to find your website at the top of the search results, and thus, attract new visitors.

However, if Magento remains the leading e-commerce solution on the market, it has a reputation of being quite slow (well… Not as slow as PrestaShop, WooCommerce, and Open Cart, but still… :P), thus making it essential to optimize said Magento-run websites.

So, let’s quickly review together today this list of server optimizations for a Magento-based e-commerce website!

• Get a dedicated server, and allocate enough resources to it.
• Check that you have an architecture adapted to your needs.
• Disable or lower logs servers (it can impact Disk I/O).
• Reduce the physical distance between your customers and your website by: Bringing servers closer to your customers (kind of like the little surprise that QUANTA is preparing in Asia… 😉 ), and Using a CDN.
• Use a reverse proxy to avoid using PHP-capable workers to handle slow clients, serve static files, …etc.
• Use PHP-FPM: It does an awesome job as a PHP worker pool and it’s the best way to have an efficient Opcache.
• Use KeepAlive directives to manage several sessions on competition on a single TCP connection.
• Activate Gzip compression.
• Update your applications (e.g Nginx, MySQL) on a regular basis.
• Optimize MySQL performance.
• Install APC to speed up your code execution time.
• Disable the Apache/Nginx modules you don’t need.
• Uninstall debugging libraries (e.g xdebug, zend debugger).
• Use SSD hard drives.

Remember that depending on your architecture, your hosting and/or your server, these solutions could bring disappointing results. That is why a monitoring tool could help you to prioritize the best-suited optimizations for you.

But if everything goes according to plan, applying these principles will let you experience a significant improvement in page loading times.

This list, of course, is not exhaustive. But it’s a start 😉 Feel free to contact us if you have any other performance-related tips to share with us!

L’article 14 server knacks to optimize your Magento store’s performance! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

We may have brought you new features, just two weeks ago, but it’s not enough for us! We aim at a constant improvement of our monitoring tool, through cutting edge technology.

So, even if you’ve already read about our Business and Favorites dashboards, just take a few minutes to discover our new profilers for PHP 7 and Magento!

New profiler QUANTA for PHP 7

PHP 7 brought huge performance improvements compared to the earlier versions, and is used more and more by e-commerce websites. So it only felt natural for us to make our PHP module compatible with this new shiny PHP release.

My team and I worked very hard to quickly bring you this new release, and I’m really proud to announce that it is just out!

To begin using our new profiler for PHP 7.0, just install it using your package manager:

• If you’re using Debian or Ubuntu: apt-get install php70-quanta-mon
• If you’re using Centos or Redhat: yum install php70-quanta-mon

Of course, you’ll need to configure your system to use our repository, prior to this step. But don’t panic! You’ll find all the technical details in our knowledge base, and we’re always just a mail away if you need any more help. 😉

New profiler QUANTA for Magento 2 CE and EE

The Magento team released a brand new version of their e-commerce CMS on November 2015, which is a total rewrite of the Magento 1.X codebase. It offers awesome new features for developers and e-commerce directors!

Some of you have already started the migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2, so we decided to prioritize our roadmap around a Magento 2 compatibility.

After a few months of coding, testing, private beta, more coding, … etc., we decided that our new profiler was finally ready to be released! So, we pressed the red button, and included it in our latest 1.2.X profiler release. If you’ve switched to Magento 2, or plan to do it, just upgrade your PHP module to enjoy this new features.

Improvement on the profiler QUANTA for Magento 1 EE

It’s been almost 6 months since we released our first PHP module for Magento 1.X. And we used this time to deal with the few glitches and shortcomings we discovered, thanks to your really valuable feedback.

We clearly saw that the compatibility with Magento EE could be improved in various ways. So, here are the “new” features we worked on:

• Better Magento event handling: The PHP module is now able to detect events generated by running scripts from the command-line, and that includes scheduled tasks like those specified in your crontab. Before our improvements, we were able to detect events generated from the backoffice (for example when you clicked on the scary “clear Magento cache” button), but it turns out that, that wasn’t enough to have a good representation of what’s happening behind the scenes.
• More timers: Most of Magento EE websites rely heavily on the FPC (Full Page Cache) feature to improve performance. So we thought that the time spent to fetch data from this cache would be a very valuable metric to provide you with. We added a timer around the FPC processing (and a few other less important ones as you might already have noticed) in our latest profiler release. I hope you’ll find it useful !

Those improvements, and the new Magento 2 compatibility, were also the opportunity for us to rethink our codebase and make it easier to change in the future. This refactoring will allow us to add compatibility with other CMS more easily in the future, so don’t be surprised if we come up with a Drupal profiler in the next few weeks !

L’article What’s Up Quanta #8 – Profilers and Compatibility est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Most companies, aware of the importance of e-commerce, launched their own online stores. To build it, they often use a CMS (Content Management System), because it allows them to focus on sales, instead of on the technical aspects of running an online store. Using a CMS, they can also easily manage their SEO and marketing actions, or even have their internet catalogue directly modified by their sales team.

Until that point, we can say that the companies using a CMS to build their online store make a sound tactical choice.

However, using a CMS for an e-commerce shop is not without consequences:

• It implements by default many functionalities that might not be useful, which can make the overall system quite heavy and slow at first.
• It is more or less prone to bugs, slowdowns or even downtimes; depending on how the CMS is built and customised after installation.
• Yet the speed of a website is crucial.

A slow website leads to a loss of conversion. It is widely known that the longer the loading time is, the higher are the chances for the customer to leave the website, and buy somewhere else.

Credits: Cedexis. Study identifying a link between performance and conversion.

Considering this issue of speed and conversion, we decided to conduct a study on the performance of 6 leading e-commerce platforms.

The idea is to establish a ranking, and find out which one delivers the best and most stable performance and UX.

So, we chose to include in the study:

• Magento (of course),
• WooCommerce, one of the leading e-commerce CMS, as you can see on the pie chart below,
• Shopify,
• Prestashop,
• OpenCart,
• And Drupal Commerce, which, with more than 7000 active websites across the world, seemed sufficiently representative to appear in this study.

Know that if you want to know more about web performance, you can also check our eBook now!

METHODOLOGY FOR THIS STUDY

To conduct this study, we took the 6 most represented E-commerce platforms on the market, so as to get more relevant results.

How did we select the websites for the study?

The study was carried out on a panel of 120 websites (20 per technology), with an Alexa ranking below 1M. The medium values revolve around rank 430.000, which represents websites with 67.000 visitors/month.

Choosing such a range gives more representativity to the study, since these websites are more likely to meet UX and performance minimum standards.

How did we analyze the performance?

The data was collected using our back-end monitoring tool, Quanta: it reproduces the behavior of a visitor going through the whole sales funnel (Home > Category > Subcategory > Product > Cart), and analyzes the speed and availability of each page from the home page to the cart.

To compare efficiently the inner performance of CMS solutions, the measure was done on the back-end time, meaning the time required for the CMS to generate the HTML code and send it back to the browser.

Selected sites were analyzed every minute, 24/7, during 30 days. The tool goes through the main five pages of the website (pages following the sales funnel, ndlr), every minute. And does this for every website selected for the study. This represents a total of 600 clicks per minute, and a total amount of 25 millions HTTP requests for the whole study.

The figures given throughout the study are the median values for each page of a regular sales funnel, out of the 20 websites selected per CMS. For a better reading comfort, we displayed the median results for all websites, per technology.

Now, let’s cut the chit chat and dive right in.

STUDY

Magento

Created in 2008, Magento is an open-source e-commerce solution. It is currently the leading e-commerce platform in Europe, with more than 250.000 websites using their technology.

Seeing that it’s an open-source solution, the Magento community is quite big and active, providing advanced user assistance and many dedicated extensions.

Magento is a very powerful CMS allowing e-companies to take care easily of their SEO and their marketing. However, it is quite difficult to master, due to its architecture and all its functionalities. Skilled developers are often needed to undertake modifications.

During our study, we discovered that Magento is a rather stable platform since the availability rate reached 99.71%, on average. Most of the time, websites were unavailable outside office hours (typically nighttime), because of maintenance windows.

Although Magento websites are the most frequented (with an average of 3000 visitors per day), they are not the fastest! The results showed that the pages, composing a classic user’s sales funnel, loaded in 665 milliseconds on average, which is beyond the “under 500 milliseconds” goal, set by Google.

However, Magento’s online cart load time is reasonable with a result of 568 milliseconds; which is fast enough to retain clients until the end of the sales funnel.

In conclusion, we can safely say that Magento is a complex machine, making it slower than the average other solutions.

To improve its performance, try using Varnish, or the built-in Full Page Cache functionality, developed by Magento itself. Those two popular cache systems can really boost you store and help it near the sweet spot of 100 milliseconds, the immediacy threshold.

WooCommerce

At the moment, WooCommerce is the leading e-commerce platform on the market. Free and easy to use, WooCommerce works as an extension of WordPress, and thus:

• does not require an external hoster,
• use the same plugins as the ones for WordPress (ex: for SEO, it’s Yoast SEO),
• has many themes and plugins available to upgrade stores,
• is very scalable, making it a good solution both for big and small companies.

So, with all these technical advantages, do we already throw in the towel and declare WooCommerce to be the ideal solution for performance? Well… Nop.

The performance test we’ve performed showed that WooCommerce is actually really slow. The average page load time of all monitored stores reached 776 milliseconds, and the average cart page loads in 1.32 second! And that’s not all. The solution is also the least stable one: the average availability for this platform was 99.52%. Can you imagine having your store being down during 40 minutes, every week?!

In conclusion, and despite its great technical advantages, WooCommerce as it is often set up, can’t be considered a reference in matters of performance. But in some measure, you can overcome its slowness by:

• using a hoster specialized in WordPress and WooCommerce websites,
• using additional modules like WP Rocket,
• compressing big and heavy images,
• or caching the maximum number of elements in your code.

Shopify

The Canadian solution Shopify is very easy to use if you want to launch an e-commerce platform. It was created in 2006, in order to create a complete website in ten minutes, tops.

Shopify is an all-in one e-commerce platform, which doesn’t require any knowledge in development to set up. E-businesses simply have to create their catalogue with the articles, texts and images they need for their store. The structure of the website, and themes, are already provided when subscribing to the solution.

Shopify is not only simple, but also very performant. The data provided during our study revealed that on average, web pages loaded in 309 milliseconds, when the Google Guidelines recommend an average of 500 milliseconds of loading time! Thanks to its fast response times and results, Shopify delivers a very good overall user experience.

The solution is also the most stable one among all of the solutions we’ve tested with an outstanding 99.95% availability rate, meaning only 5 minutes of downtime per week!

Such performances and stability can be explained by the fact that Shopify is a full-Saas platform; meaning that it manages both the CMS and its hosting. This specificity is definitively an advantage pertaining to loading times and availability, but the drawback is that when Shopify’s servers are down or suffer a slowdown (and we happened to measure a few of them during this study), all the websites hosted are affected simultaneously in the same way.

PrestaShop

Since its public release in 2007, PrestaShop is a very popular CMS in France. The solution is used by 250,000 websites across the globe, and has a huge community (1 million community members!).

PrestaShop is free to download and install, and provides native basic functionalities. However, in order to have a fully functional website, it is necessary to download themes and extensions within the PrestaShop market, which are hardly ever free… Given the community behind it, they are numerous and effective.

The analysis of PrestaShop websites’ performance showed average results. The average speed for every page is 772 milliseconds, with the cart being the fastest page at 483 milliseconds.

However, PrestaShop presented a very good availability rate considering its 99,91% rate. Several pages returned “step timedout” errors, meaning that the probes waited for more than 20 seconds for the page to come back before giving up. Apart from a few stores that encountered problems, the average availability of the top performers is pretty good.

Those results could possibly be improved using many optimizations and caching tools the solution provides, as well as choosing a hoster fitted for PrestaShop, using a CDN or other reverse proxy solutions.

OpenCart

Released in 2005, OpenCart is another free e-commerce solution aimed at beginners. Used by more than 300,000 websites worldwide, OpenCart represents around 7% of all CMS technologies available on the market.

OpenCart offers more than 6000 plugins, among which more than 1600 are free. These plugins offer a large variety of features used by e-companies to customize their e-store. The CMS is therefore fitted to small to medium companies.

Yet, our study revealed disappointing results when it came to performance: websites using OpenCart are among the slowest of them all, with an average load time of 831 milliseconds, which is more than 1.6 times higher than the Google guideline for SEO! Category pages are even slower with 936 milliseconds. The cart is the only page below 800 milliseconds with 600 milliseconds.

The availability for this solution is 99.71%, which represents a quite stable website.

Improving your page load time when using OpenCart is recommended, if you want to retain your customers and avoid frustration.

Drupal Commerce

Last but not least, we monitored a panel of Drupal Commerce stores. Created in 2011, Drupal Commerce is an extension of Drupal, adding to the original CMS all the e-commerce features needed by online companies. It is free and open-source.

One of Drupal Commerce’s particularity, is to be really well-fitted for SEO, which allows websites to climb the rankings in Google search engine.

Drupal Commerce was a rather good solution when it came to performance. In fact, the medium for the pages load time is 669 milliseconds, which represents the third best performance out of all the technologies tested, very close to Magento.

With 99.82% availability rate, Drupal Commerce represents the third most available technology among the tested CMS. It is clearly a reliable technology to use for an e-commerce store.

However, creating and updating a Drupal Commerce based website is not as simple as when using Shopify or Prestashop. It requires a dedicated team of developers, and thus, to invest some time and money into the set up.

AND THE WINNER IS…?

So, at the end, what CMS is the best e-commerce platform when it comes to performance?

The cloud graph below shows all the websites, from all technologies, according to their average speed and availability rate. You can clearly see that Shopify and Drupal Commerce websites are nearing the top, whereas other CMS based websites have disparate results.

In conclusion, taking into account all the datas provided and analyzed, we drew up a podium, for the most performant e-commerce platform:

The study revealed Shopify websites tends to be faster and more available than other CMS-based websites.

However, several general conclusions may be drawn from our analysis, the most important one being that the technology used for a website is not the only key factor to get good performances.

Indeed, relying only on a CMS native availability or speed will certainly lead to poor performance, and numerous issues. To get the best performance as possible, it is crucial to rely on a professional team of developers, who will be able to maximize website optimization, and decrease page load time at each important step of the e-commerce sales funnel.

L’article What is the Best E-Commerce Platform for Web Performance? est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

If it takes too much time to load, even fractions of seconds, the answer is a lot (without even mentioning the impact of a slow webpage on its SEO).

In order to help you with the evaluation of your current performance, here are six free and premium tools that allow you to observe loading time, to identify the main problems to resolve, to monitor your progress and to compare your E-commerce website to your competitors’.

1) DareBoost

Dareboost analyses more than 100 points on your website and gives you a complete report on its performance and how to improve it:

• Cache
• SEO
• Accessibility
• Security
• Number of requests
• Display optimization

Those features are available in an unique/single tool, and does not require a setup or peculiar configurations. You can test your website on different browsers, locations and devices (PC, mobile), and consult your results in the blink of an eye.

The report generated allows you to target your priorities and to resolve problems that slow down your website’s performance.

You also get precise and personalized technical advices:

Other pros (among the numerous features available): DareBoost insures the regular monitoring of your strategic webpages, reproduces the transactional path of your users and alerts you in case of a mistake.

Website link

2) Pingdom Tools

Pingdom Tools analyses the speed of a website and monitors its performance on a daily basis.

You just have to enter your website’s URL to launch the test. Pick the closest city – Amsterdam for instance – to obtain the most relevant results according to your targeted market location.

Pingdom Tools gives you a performance mark and your rank according to the speed of the other tested websites.

As you can see on the screenshots, Pingdom Tools does not deliver only a view on the situation, but work leads to improve the speed of your website:

• Which resources slow down the webpage the most?
• Do you use a browser cache system?
• Are your pictures optimized for the web?
• Do you have a redirection problem?
• Are some of your tools endangering your Magento-based website’s performance?

Displaying a colourful and graphic-oriented interface, you can immediately identify the most urgent actions to take.

To go further, the premium version of Pingdom Tools can be really useful. It starts from less than $15 per year and a free month to begin with.

In addition to the previous features, you will receive alerts if your website is down, use a monitoring tool of your visitors in real-time, compare the evolution of your performance with a detailed history/track of record, follow carefully the steps of your most important funnels…

Website (free and premium version for less than $15/month)

3) Google PageSpeed Insights

As its name suggests, Google PageSpeed Insights is a free tool by Google in order to evaluate the performance of your website.

Even though it doesn’t give proper load time of your website, the main interest of this solution is twofold: mobile webpage and computer version. It allows you to prioritize your website’s performance enhancement.

Recommendations are sorted by topic – speed, UX, and by order of priority – from the most important rules to approved ones. Rules refer to the facts taken into account to evaluate your website.

These screenshots of an analysis show you what you should expect: image optimization, Javascript and CSS size and resources management. It’s relatively basic information, but you can click on suggestions to learn more about how you can handle it.

Website

4) GTmetrix (PRO version recommended)

GTmetrix has a significant advantage: it can analyze your website combining Google PageSpeed and YSlow.

You get complete reports about regarding the speed of your website, your different scores, but also about 30 criteria to follow and to improve to insure better performances of your e-commerce online store.

Like other speed tools, results display allow you to rapidly identify urgent actions:

Here, for instance, image optimization looks like the simplest task to begin with, taking into account the three Es that can be enhanced very quickly.

If you want to get the best use out of GTmetrix, the best thing to do is to subscribe to a PRO subscription (from $14,95/month).

This subscription allows you to choose the location of the test server: if you are located in Europe, London looks like the best option (it is set to Vancouver by default).

PRO subscriptions give you access to a large number of features, among which exportable detailed reports, website monitoring, tests from multiple locations in the world, creation of video reports to visualize load time step by step, multiple browser website versions, custom alerts set up…

Website

5) Which loads faster ?

The aim of this tool is to compare the load time of two different websites to position yourself on the market.

It’s simple : you just have to enter the two URLs to get the results. However, forget about the detailed advices of the other tools: Which loads faster is rather useful for speed comparison than to give you real hints to make optimization.

An overview of the comparison between Le Monde and Le Figaro websites

Website

6) YSlow (extension)

YSlow is interesting as it is an extension to add to your browser.

It analyses your performance owing to 34 criteria that constitute a matrix:

Here is the display of the tool:

(c)YSlow

Website

We have already presented six tools which can greatly improve your online performance.. But let us not forget about the most important one: Quanta!

7) Quanta

Quanta is a SaaS solution dedicated to E-merchants and E-commerce Directors looking for a better understanding of the performance of their website. By rendering complex data easily understood thanks to an interactive interface, it allows them to set clear and concrete goals to tackle their website performance.

How does it work? Quanta simulates the purchasing route of a user (what we call a ‘web scenario’) to monitor the speed of each page. The analysis is performed every minute to measure speed variations and potential bottlenecks/incidents occurring during the sales process. The tool also offers an integrated Magento profiler (more CMS profilers to come) designed to target the elements that should be improved.

Your website is too slow? React now!

L’article Slow Magento? Six tools to test your E-commerce store’s speed est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

It is a pity knowing that many tools exist to check the page load time of an E-commerce store. However, I found some explanations to this phenomenon. Firstly, some business owners or Heads of small E-commerce stores are not really aware of the impact of speed on business KPIs. Moreover, it is complicated to position one’s website’s performance on the market if not coming from a technical background.

Many online tools (charged or free) offer speed testing. However all of them are measuring very different aspects of “speed”.

You want to get the big picture and be able to follow your store performance? The idea of this article is to help you, as a business owner or Head of E-commerce to use the right tools or combination of tools that will help you to get (and keep!) an overall perspective of your store’s performance.

But first, there is a single technical thing that you need to understand; I promise that’s the only geeky part!

What are the steps to load a page?

When a visitor comes to your store and asks for the homepage www.website.com, many things are going to happen beneath the surface. You could sum up the whole page load time in two simple steps.

First, we have the back end loading time (also called “time to first byte”) which is the time required for the user’s browser to download the HTML code of the page. It takes usually longer in your store’s lifetime as your E-commerce application (typically Magento) is getting heavier after many custom developments.

The back end loading time represents a very painful wait for a user because the only thing he sees in his browser is a big white page, with absolutely no content at all.

Once the back end loading time is over, the user’s browser downloads a file (the HTML code) which represents roughly the layout of the homepage and most part of the text that will be printed on screen. This file contains also a list of additional external content that will need to be downloaded as well to render the page correctly, including images and some other files like JS, CSS files (which will be used to make the layout more precise and the page interactive). This corresponds to the front end loading time.

During that phase, the whole layout of the page is being built on the screen, images are progressively appearing and the page becomes interactive (clickable), allowing the user to go further on category or product pages for instance.

As you can imagine, these two phases are both very important and will need to be both fast to maximize the user experience on your store.

I suggest you track the results of each step independently, as it will help you to point out to your hoster orweb agency what can improved.. Be also aware that for each of those steps, optimizations will be made possible by both the web agencies (Magento code optimizations) and your hosting partner (system configuration optimizations).

If you are searching for a list of tools for your website’s optimization, you can check out our six favorite tools to test an E-commerce platform. Out of all these tools, Pingdom and Dareboost are probably the simplest ones for non-techs.

Best practices

Now that you’ve got a better view with a clear measurement on both back end loading time and front end loading time, here are the best practices to keep tracking your website’s speed.

Above all, you must check the loading time regularly. The average E-commerce store is being modified every week! Thus, performance should be checked very regularly to avoid losing any conversion due to a temporary slowdown.

I have very often seen merchants encounter problems with their cache, for example, and not noticing that they had an additional 1 second of page load time for a few days – which represents a 10% loss of revenue according to Amazon.

Then, make sure to check each page of your sales funnel. Every millisecond counts for your conversion, so if you regularly keep track the performance of your website, you are doing it right. Yet, you must keep in mind that you have to monitor not only your homepage, but all the pages that matters for your conversion (for example : search, category, add to cart, etc.).

In order to be sure to focus on the most impacted pages, check in your Google Analytics and see which are the most viewed pages. You can select the top 5 or 10 pages and add those pages to your regular speed check.

Finally, you must connect those checks to an alerting system with relevant thresholds.

What if your store slows down on a busy day and you are away from the office? Is there somebody in your organization who will be receiving an alert if let’s say, the “cart page” now takes 10 seconds to load?

It could result in a decrease of 10% in conversion rate until somebody sees it and fixes it. You need to specify the right threshold so that you don’t receive too many emails, so that you keep reading them. Making sure that you do get an alert, even by SMS, when your turnover is affected.

L’article How to perform a Magento Speed Test? est apparu en premier sur Quanta.