With so much competition online for traffic and exposure, only the most optimized eCommerce websites have a fighting chance of getting found and becoming profitable fast enough to be worth the investment. One of the easiest ways to make sure your store starts on the right foot is to host it on an eCommerce platform like Magento, an open-source platform with a large community of support services. However, most of your competitors already know this so you will also need the help of Magento web designers if you want to outcompete them and bring more traffic to your online store.
There are many things they can do in order to create a fast Magento store that will offer a great user experience. One of the most important is to find a good hosting provider that offers great performance. If your website doesn’t have ample space for caching, decent hardware and countless technical tweaks, no eCommerce web design package will be able to make it fly. There are many providers who claim to offer incredible hosting and amazing deals. However, only experienced Magento web designers can guide you through the pitfalls of hosting a website and point you in the right direction so you can take full advantage of Magento´s true power and offer a quality customer experience.
Here are five steps you can take to further advance your way into more sales.
1st Step: Check out what’s slowing down your Magento website
Out of the box, Magento is very stable and SEO optimized. But as you add more features, plugins and pictures, speed starts taking a hit. There are many tools that help with this process. Two of the best free ones are Google Page Speed and Pingdom. Both offer great insight into how you can improve the performance of your Magento website.
2nd Step: Improve Magento performance with caching
There are several ways to improve page loading times in Magento. The most important is using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) or installing an additional module like Varnish which will act as a cache for your site, storing frequently accessed files while pushing out any new data automatically when it comes in.
3rd Step : Optimize database queries
Another way to speed up Magento is by optimizing database queries on the backend. Doing this requires a professional Magento web designer and developer. This should be one of your last resorts as it can break or change parts of your store, so you should only do it if other options didn’t work either.
4th Step: Optimize images on your Magento Store
Images make up for around 60% of all data that needs to be transferred when a page is loaded. That’s why optimizing them can have a significant impact on how fast your website loads. A slow loading site not only leaves visitors frustrated but it also has a negative impact on conversions. There are several tools out there to help you with optimizing the images on your Magento store. Two of my favorites are Smush.it and Kraken.io.
5th Step: Leverage browser caching
The last tip I will give you is to leverage browser caching. You can do that very simply by adding the appropriate code to your .htaccess file. Browser caching is a server setting that allows the browser to load files from a local cache instead of reloading them from the web. This has a significant impact on your store’s loading time as it will make sure not all of your images and other media needs to be downloaded from the web every time someone visits the site.
The most important thing you should remember is to keep things simple. Don’t let yourself be tempted by numerous Magento themes that promise the world, do it step by step and you will see a difference. The best way to make sure these steps are performed correctly is with the help of a Magento web designer. 1DigitalⓇ Agency offers SEO and eCommerce support for online stores that need that extra push to become leaders in their niche.
