Just like Google searches done on a desktop, as of July, mobile searches now also consider speed. The Silicon Valley company has indeed expressed that mobile content, even if very relevant, will be bumped down the search engine’s results pages if it takes too long to load.
It is commonly accepted that a page’s loading speed has a strong impact on conversion rates, and as a result, on the overall performance of online sales. With this announcement, Google takes a step further by stating that a mobile site with poor web performance will lose visibility by being less well referenced. The direct result is a reduction in the number of visits to the site. Online sales numbers are directly linked to these two factors, so a site’s profitability hangs in the balance.

In June 2017, 56% of visits to websites in France were made from a mobile device (source DN/Médiamétrie and eStat), so online retailers should not just think “mobile first” but “fast mobile first”, or they risk jeopardizing their sales volumes. The American giant’s decision to demand good user experience will require online retailers to change in step.

With this change, e-merchants must therefore work to improve their mobile web performance. More than 500 online businesses have already followed the steps below to avoid being relegated to the famous search engine’s lower ranks:

1/ Identify Your Key Pages
Google is a major source of traffic for e-commerce sites. Based on what they search and Google’s index, web users won’t  all land on the same page. It is therefore best to first identify the pages upon which users most frequently land, and then focus your efforts on those ones first. The most cost-effective and pragmatic approach is to take note of the most important pages for your business and concentrate on them.

2/ Compare the Speed of Your Key Pages To Those of Your Competitors
By using Google’s automatic test page, you can compare your site to that of your competitors. When the test is complete, you just have to select your industry to see if you are one of the good or bad students.

3/ Optimize
Among the most important recommendations:
– Use a cache system (CDN)
– Enable compression on your server
– Compress and resize images in order to provide the user with content that is always perfectly tailored to their device

The list of optimizations to complete (and to maintain over time!) is long. Google also
provides PageSpeed Insights, a tool you can use to determine if the improvements you implement on your site are making an immediate effect.

4/ Monitor
An e-commerce site is a complex and perpetually moving machine. Every week, your site undergoes several changes that may lead to unexpected slowdowns or disruptions. If these performance problems are not identified and corrected before Google next analyzes your site, they can have serious repercussions on your site’s ranking. Implementing a system of continuous measurement, slowdown identification, and alerting is therefore necessary for your site’s long-term success.

L’article Google Speed Update: When Web Performance Impacts SEO, How Do You Ensure Your Mobile Site is Up to Speed? est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Here is a little tour of the main Web Performance KPIs that should catch your attention.

Loading time: a basic metric, but a little outdated

Loading time has been the first performance indicator used. It simply represents the overall loading time of a page (until the last pixel is displayed).
It is interesting to follow this indicator but it does not represent the customer experience. The main reason for that is that a page is usually displayed progressively and become interactive before being fully loaded, which makes the user feel like the page was loaded before the total loading time was reached.

Speed ​​Index: a weighted measure of loading time

The Speed ​​Index is a measure of the display time that takes into account the actual user experience. It is expressed in milliseconds. A low score means a fast display and therefore a better user experience. Concretely, the speed Index represents the average display time of all pixels above the bottom of the screen.

Let’s take an example:

Page A is displayed progressively (30% of pixels at 0.5 seconds, 70% at 1 second and 100% at 1.5 seconds) vs page B which is displayed in one time (0 to 100% at 1.5 seconds).

Page A and Page B will have the same loading time (1.5 seconds). However, the user experience will be much better on page A.
In the case of page A, as the page is displayed gradually, it has a double positive effect for the user:

• He has a visual confirmation that the page is loading: it helps him to wait and keeps him focus on the page.
• He can already use some of the page contents: the loading time is no longer “lost”.

The Speed ​​Index calculation will take this difference into account to favor the progressive display. Thus, Speed ​​Index page A will be 1000ms when the one of page B will be 1500ms.

What is a good Speed ​​Index?
It is commonly accepted that after a 1 second wait, customers will lose their train of thought and their purchase intent. After 3 seconds, more than half of them will leave the site out of frustration. Therefore, a good Speed ​​Index should ideally be (and stay!) under 1000ms. Between 1000 in 3000ms, the navigation remains “acceptable” but fragile. And above 3000ms it is absolutely necessary to improve it as the risk of losing visitors if becomes very high.

​​Page Speed Score: a best practice compliance indicator

The ​​Page Speed score is a very different indicator. It does not represent the loading time, but Google’s best practice recommendations.
This score is a global grade out of 100 and made up with the compliance grades of each different best practices.

Thus, Google Page Speed ​​is not an indicator representing the user experience, but rather a tool that will highlight optimization opportunities. It is very complementary to other KPIs as following your PageSpeed score will help you build the optimization roadmap to ultimately improve your Speed Index and User Experience.

As a conclusion, there are many indicators to track the Web Performance of your pages. But in the end, what you need to follow the big picture which is “how is my User Experience?”. To answer this question, the Speed ​​Index is the reference. On the other hand, once you have identified which pages need to be improved, you need to know what to do next to be able to improve, and this is when the ​​Page Speed score makes the most sense.

L’article Loading time, Speed Index, Score Page Speed… which indicator better represents the User Experience? est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

L’article Why using a CDN is critical to your web performance est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

L’article How HTTP2 will boost your Web Performance! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Time to take a look. 😉

AMP, or the idea of an ever faster web on mobile

Like me, you must have experienced in the past the frustration of not being able to load content on your mobile, even when all you wanted to do was access a simple information.

In this situation, you probably left the website to look for the same content elsewhere. And you’re surely not the only one that reacted like this! Most Internet users react negatively to delays and favor the fastest experiences. This user behavior results in a much better user engagement rate, and better referencing, for websites that have bet on Web Performance.

And it is in this context of a quest for immediacy, that the open-source project AMP was launched in 2016, by Google. This project has since grown to become a community of more than 160 contributors around the world.

In concrete terms, AMP describes a format that allows you to create a page that will appear more quickly on mobile terminals. We are talking here about a median time perceived by users of less than 1 second.

Technically, AMP pages are just “normal” web pages, in HTML, and therefore compatible with all web browsers. They are nevertheless fine-tuned to be very light when loading on a mobile phone. And this is where this project becomes interesting for Quanta, as Google directly broaches the issue of Web Performance on mobile.

How AMP works

AMP tends to several problems for the speed of content display.

• Instant loading (originally Instant rendering)

With AMP, there is the possibility to pre-load links that the user would want to click, so that when he clicks, the content appears immediately as if it were already fully cached (in fact it’s the same principle as the cache for that matter, except that it is built even before accessing the content for the first time).

In order to not overload the CPU and the bandwidth necessary to load content that a user would not eventually see, the AMP system will simply pre-load the top of the landing page only and, when the user actually accesses the content, the rest of the page is loaded while he reads the top of the page.

• Pre-set layout while the items load

In AMP, the size of each element is set in the HTML, in order to avoid “surprises” during loading. Once the text is displayed, it will not move until the user interacts with the page, thus ensuring that the reading is not disturbed.

Of course, this principle is not limited to simple text. 😉 If you have videos and lots of funky stuff (like call-to-actions) that you need to display between the paragraphs of your text, AMP can be a valuable help thanks to the system of placeholders.

With placeholders, you can display banner ads, videos, or any other item with a variety of extensions, but the size of each item will be predefined on the page, with a pre-set area (typically a gray square).

A simple example would be a Youtube video. On an AMP page, a predefined rectangle will appear first, then fill up with the preview of a YouTube video while the user is quietly reading the article.

This system of placeholders for the elements of an AMP page makes the (recurring) problem  of pages that shift, as the elements are loaded, no longer an issue. Ever tried to read a book while being disturb every 3 seconds? Nightmare… Thus, with AMP, you no longer need to “scroll down” to find the line on which you were. And that’s quite an improvement in user experience.

• Fonts

There is some technical cumbersomeness in the loading of fonts, which for most pages comes very late during the process of loading a page. Typically, fonts will be loaded after any content that can possibly call a font, or after all the javascripts. With AMP, the loading order is optimized, and the fonts will be able to load from the beginning, in parallel with the rest, which ultimately makes the final display much faster.

• Analytics and speed finally united

With AMP, the use of tags is limited so as to avoid having several tags potentially blocking the page.

At Quanta, we see that some emerchants frequently keep tags that they no longer use, which slow down their users. And each of these slowdowns has a negative impact on their conversion rates.

In AMP, the subject was therefore taken seriously to avoid as much as possible these untimely loadings. Tags can be called, but only via a single interface that can not slow down the page (asynchronous). For most tag vendors, the implementation of Google’s system is quite simple. But, if you use more “exotic” tags, you’ll need to do little technical adaptation to use them with AMP.

All these specificities of the AMP system didn’t come out of nowhere. These are the result of many tests and clever choices made by a college of performance gurus, who probably had enough of seeing that the Internet is still slow, despite all the technological progress.

An innovation and … a controversy

Google AMP ultimately aims for a loading speed, so far unmatched, on mobile; a loading that now seems “instantaneous”. Therefore, this seems a perfect web performance weapon.

However, like any technical innovation, Google AMP does not come without controversy.

Firstly, it should be noted that this new format was launched without the W3C’s approval, which, as everyone knows, act like a wise council, and is responsible for regulating the Internet in an open and independent way. This tacit respect for the role of W3C on the net often makes it possible for new formats that may appear to become technical standards, and thus to be widely used. By bypassing W3C, Google takes the risk to see the AMP format disappear quickly.

In addition, another recurring criticism made by many web analysts (especially when you look at the articles of The Register, or CSS-Tricks on the subject, which is a must-read) concerns the underlying nature of the AMP project.

As I explained in this article, the concept of AMP aims at adapting the content to technical specifications which, in turn, serve Web Performance. The fear of many authors is that in the long run, in the hope of seeing their SEO in Google maintained, and their appeal to users untouched, the creators of digital content end up impoverishing their productions to stick to the technical recommendations of Google.

Fear certainly justified, but with regard to the benefits in terms of Web Performance, at Quanta, we assume that, as always: “The truth lies somewhere in the middle.”

And you, what do you think of Google AMP? Do you use it for your website? Do not hesitate to leave us comments!

L’article Google AMP, when immediacy becomes a rule est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

Launch a closed-access version of the website, in advance

Some countries and states passed regulations to supervise sales periods. For example, the French government forbids the display of discounted prices, on the first day of the sales period, before 8am. The big problem here, is that most customers are eagerly waiting far before that time! But a massive change in the contents of an e-commerce platform (for example the prices, or the design announcing “Sales”), when said platform is full of users, is sure to be too much for the servers.

Why? Simply because when this horde of users try to access pages that haven’t been put in cache yet (because they’re “new”), the CMS has to do complex calculations that will inevitably overcharge your servers.

So. To avoid this unpleasantness, it is far better to simply close your website the evening before the start of the sales. Trust me, you’ll lose very few customers that night because, come on! Who buys online the day before a sales period? 0_0 And you’ll definitely be thankful for this decision later. Little bonus pointer: put your design team to work and ask them to concoct a kickass maintenance page, with a little teaser video, a countdown, …etc. Now back to business! In parallel to this “closing down”, launch online, with a closed access, the “Sales” version of the website, only accessible to your IP address and your web agency.

This way, between midnight and the official sales launch hour, you’ll be able to check one last time the performance of your entire sales funnel, in its “sales” version, in the prod environment.

I’m insisting on the “in the prod environment”, because even if your web agency gave you the green light in the pre-prod setting, it is better to be safe than sorry. Always check the entire sales funnel in its prod version, before opening hours.

The results will be that, when the hour has come to reopen the website, you’ll just have to drop your beautiful teaser page, and you’ll immediately be able to welcome your customers. Your team will have gained some bags under their eyes during the night, but they will thank you later when they will not have to perform emergency fixings, in haste.

Automatically pre-load your caches

Instead of trying to visit all your website’s pages, by hand, in their “sales” version, before the official launch, it is far more effective to use a bot to do it.

Why, you ask? Because that way, all the “sales” pages will be preloaded before the official launch of your “Sales” close-access website. They will be stored in cache (Varnish, Full Page Cache, or your CMS’s cache), before the arrival of your customers.

The page needs only to be accessed once, for it to be stored in the cache system. That is why a bot is needed; to gradually access to all your “Sales” website’s pages.

Here are some tools you can use for this operation:

• mage-perftest
  HTTrack
  Nutch
  Sphider
  Crawler4j

Just a little warning. These are all “geeky” and powerful tools, so it is important to take your time to conduct the aforementioned operation. If not, you’ll take the risk of simply crashing your website with the influx of requests. So, discuss the “how/when to” with your web agency!

Forbid back-office actions on the first day!

It only takes a simple click in your CMS’s back-office to ruin one of the most important business day of your year. Clicks in the back-office consume a lot of server resources, and it can be dangerous for the platform, especially when they happen at the same time of a buttload of orders.

Our advice? At the very least, inform your e-commerce / sales team that on the first day of the sales period, nobody is to use your CMS’s back office to add new products, or modify the existing ones’ descriptions.

On that day, it’s hands off! No more touch ups! And if you really want to have peace of mind, just plainly (temporarily) forbid the access to your back office to all non-tech/vital users. 😉

You don’t think that’s such a big deal? Well, we’ve seen and measured it, time and again, at QUANTA. A simple back office click can invalidate the caches of a lot of pages, and greatly affect a website (Cf point 2, for those of you that have been following :P).

More info on this subject here.

Temporarily add front-end servers

Warning, it’s time for a little tech talk! 😉 At QUANTA, we observed that for almost all CMS, but specifically for Magento, the peaks in customer activity induce peaks in the CPU load on front-end servers (those that generate the visual pages for e-commerce website), more than the load on database servers. Although it is usually all by itself, the database server is generally less solicited than the rest of the architecture.

And that’s truly for the better. Simply because it is complex to have several database servers working in parallel to hold a larger load, whereas it is very simple to add front-end servers to distribute queries between a string of servers (Commonly referred to as a “server pool”).

In other words, to sustain the load on the first day of the sales period, rather than multiplying the database servers, just multiply the front-end servers.

However, do not do this rashly. If you only had a single front-end server until then, it is important to verify that the architecture of your website is ready to accommodate other fronts. The potential implications are to be discussed beforehand with your agency, but the main one you should focus on is the user sessions (cookies). The question to ask yourself is whether a user session, in your configuration, is stored as a file in a directory on the front-end server, or if it is stored in a shareable system such as the database, or a cache server like Redis? The session must be shared and accessible by each of the front-end servers so that the user’s navigation (Login, Adding a cart) is not disturbed.

Imagine if your customer puts an article in his cart, then is redirected to a server that can no longer find his session and his product. There is a good chance that he will slam the door of your website.

But even with this key step to be watchful of, adding front-end servers remains the easiest way to increase the capacity of your site for the first days of sales.

Last but not least. Try to install your front-end servers 2 to 3 days before the sales period, so as to be sure of:

• The good working of your sales funnel, on each of your servers (Yes, I already said that, and I’ll keep saying it.)
  To installation of your monitoring probes on these new servers, in order to have a complete mapping of the health of your architecture for the D-Day.

Run load tests

In order to be sure that you will be able to welcome more visitors than usual on your website, I advise you to simulate a peak of traffic higher than the one you expect on the day of the sales.

Yes, yes, and yes! Get some leeway! It would surely be extremely frustrating if your emailing campaigns worked too well, but if you ended up with a crashed website, thus torpedoing your turnover. By the bye! It reminds me of the story of an e-commerce director on the first day of sales… 😛

To perform load tests, many solutions exist, grouped in 2 categories:

• House tests performed by your teams, with generally free and time consuming tools as siege, wget, curl, ab, etc.
• “Pro” tests performed by independent third parties such as CloudNetCare, Neotys or QUANTA.

Whichever solution is chosen in the end, during these tests it is important to:

• Simulate what a customer would do on your website, by basing the scenario of your load tests on the behavior of your average customer, monitored in your Google Analytics history.
• Do your calculations so as to easily see what the limit is (before your website crash, ndlr). Unintelligible example of load test results: “We can handle 13 422 HTTP requests per minutes with 60% of CPU” “… Ok. Buuuut… Is that good or bad?” Intelligible example of load test results: “My website in “Sales mode” handles, without disturbances, 5 times the traffic recorded during our previous sales period, and this with virtual customers going through the whole sales funnel.” “Ok, then I am relaxed for the D-day.”

If you want to know more about important things you should keep in mind before you get started; we already wrote a comprehensive guide on the implementation of load tests.

Good sales to you!

L’article QUANTA’s 5 tips for successful sales! est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

The entire Quanta team has worked hard to offer you brand new features. So it was high time to talk about it. 😉 So here we go for the overview of the new alerting system, and of the latest profiler, the one for OroCommerce.

THE NEW ALERTING SYSTEM

As some of you may have already noticed in the app, we’re undertaking a major project to profoundly improve the QUANTA alerting system, making it ever more customizable and intuitive.

The first phase of this work has just ended and mainly concerned the “configuration of alerting” part, to make this crucial tool more fun to use.

So we built a new page specially dedicated to the subject, soberly called “Alerting”.

This tab of the app now allows you to:

• Configure your alerts with a simplified subscription form,
• Manage your (very) many alerts more easily,
• As well as register your teammates for alerts when you are in “administrator mode”.

New “Alerting” tab in QUANTA

Of course, all these actions are also possible for the Daily & Weekly Digests.

All this work of personalization on the alerting dashboard was accompanied by a complete overhaul of the system, to make it more scalable, which will allow us in the future to implement new functionalities more easily.

This work did not, of course, happen at random. This redesign was necessary to prepare for the “Phase 2”, which promises some surprises. We are indeed working on some new features that should be released in the weeks to come:

• Configuring custom thresholds alerts,
• And the possibility of now being warned when a web scenario exceeds a certain threshold of loading time (against an alert only in case of scenario error, currently).

We hope that these new features will please you, and please, do not hesitate to send us your remarks. 😉

THE ONE AND ONLY PROFILER FOR OROCOMMERCE

For those who follow the technological advances in the field of e-commerce, you surely have already heard about OroCommerce, the new CMS published by Oro, and destined to BtoB companies.

And for those who are also following the Quanta news, you must have heard that we released the very first OroCommerce profiler, designed to monitor the performance of this brand new platform.

Like our already well proven Magento 1 and Magento 2 profilers, our users now have a profiler that offers the same level of analysis for OroCommerce websites.

Analysis of the general performance of an OroCommerce website in the QUANTA app

This new profiler allows you to have an extra level of detail of analysis on all the e-commerce websites running on OroCommerce. It allows you to precisely identify the code blocks that have the greatest impact on OroCommerce’s web performance, and to track live the evolution of the application’s execution time.

Detailed analysis of the different loading times of an OroCommerce website in the QUANTA app

Detailed analysis of the blocks of an OroCommerce website in the QUANTA app

This new profiler is currently in beta. To use it, simply send an email to the support team, and we will gladly give you access to it. 🙂

So that’s it for this What’s Up Quanta # 11!

See you soon for other news about the new features for the QUANTA app, and do not hesitate to contact us for specific requests. We are always eager to hear good ideas to improve the app, and to always offer you more web performance!

L’article What’s Up Quanta #11 – A new alerting system and the famous OroCommerce profiler est apparu en premier sur Quanta.

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.

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.