How to solve two distressing pain points in Magento

how to solve pain points in magento

Magento is the ecommerce platform for future, there is no doubt about that. Since its official release in 2008, the activity around Magento seems to be high, estimates Google Trend. Moreover, out of the top 100,000 ecommerce websites, 16% use Magento ecommerce CMS. Considering all these factors, why users still complain about Magento? For one or the other reasons, Magento users tend to move to competitors like WooCommerce, Shopify, Volusion and various other ecommerce tools that are vying with each other in the market. Still Magento enjoys its prestigious position as the top ecommerce platform in the market due to the elegant features it offers.

Having said this, here we try to highlight two major pain points that forces Magento customers to leave the platform and look for alternatives. Not just that, this piece will also walk you through the best practices or tips that you ought to follow to address the pain points. So let us begin!

Pain Point 1- Any website with a loading time of more than 2 seconds fails to increase conversions

A case in point: When a leader in the online sales of confectionaries and desserts faced speed and performance issues with their Magento website, Suyati’s Magento team executed the following guidelines to reduce the load time.

Hosting the Magento website on a capable and robust server like AWS:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Magento make a powerful duo. When configured and set up properly, each syncs and complements well. When you install Magento into AWS Cloud, along with cost efficiency, you also gain business continuity. AWS empowers you to create a flexible and scalable infrastructure for your Magento ecommerce store. Today, more than 12,500 Magento stores are hosted by Amazon’s cloud-based solution and this number is expected to increase in the coming years.

Never disappoint your customers with less capable Search feature:

As soon as a customer visits your e-store, they use the Search feature on your website to discover products they want. Remember, customers are so accustomed to using Search, so it is pertinent for you to deliver the results they expect. It is taxing for the customers to scroll pages after pages without identifying the products they need.

Magento’s advanced search feature by nature is better than many other third-party tools. If we integrate a separate search engine like Solr search or Elastic Search with Magento Search, we can reduce the load on the Magento database to fulfil the search requirements of different types of customers. It is also possible to implement Solr search in Magento Community Edition using additional plug in.

The Magento Enterprise edition tries to resolve this issue by replacing MySQL with Apache Solr as it is a full text search engine. Solr provides you greater control over how Search performs and you can easily throw up to the customer what he/ she is looking for. Now, what if you don’t have Magento Enterprise? We suggest you to go for ElasticSearch, which has been designed to operate in the Cloud. The advanced API of Elastic Search allows us to develop sophisticated integrations with Magento. Unlike MySQL, ElasticSearch has the ability to analyze natural language while working with the text.

At Suyati, we have a dedicated Magento team that is capable of building a Magento extension to take complete advantage of ElasticSearch. With our extension, we improve the key features of ElasticSearch including Autocomplete, custom search indexer, and Fuzzy search.

Utilize the right Magento cache strategy

Magento is a robust platform that is capable of performing multiple types of caching that incredibly improves the speed your online store. For better results, it is advised to merge NGINX+APC+Mmcache+Varnish caching. Magento offers an inbuilt caching module that reduces the server load by serving the previously visited web pages. This makes your site run faster. Using PHP accelerator allows you to cache PHP scripts in their compiled state which enhances the performance of your site. Use PHP accelerators such as APC, Memcahced, or HTTP accelerators like varnish cache.

APC or Alternative PHP Cache is an open source framework with a mature codebase. It works with all PHP versions and you gain 3x increase in page generation speed.

Memcached fits well for die-hard users as it offers a very fast cache backend. Memcached is a high-performing distributed memory object caching system, tailored to relieve the database load. It is highly suitable for speeding up the dynamic web applications.

Varnish Cache is a HTTP accelerator or a reverse HTTP proxy that significantly enhances your site’s performance. Varnish cache stores a copy of the page in the RAM when a user visits your page for the first time. This endows you with incredible ability to handle more site traffic.

All these caching techniques help in performance improvement by diminishing PHP execution time.

Use Magento’s built-in feature to merge CSS and JavaScript files

Magento offers a built-in feature to merge your CSS and JavaScript files into a single file. This speeds up the loading time of your website and reduces the total number of HTTP requests. It is also advisable to use Magento extensions like Minify Js / CSS / HTML. The Minify extension is an easy to use, full-feature extension that reduces server load, page size, bandwidth etc. It also improves your search engine rankings, user experience and conversion rates.

Apart from this, using Magento’s compilation feature gives a 50% performance boost. Magento compiler reduces the filesystem reads by copying all files into one directory and also caches the frequently used ones.

Speed up the load time with a Content Delivery Network

Majority of the highest-ranking blogs deliver their assets like images, JS, CSS files etc. through a CDN or Content Delivery Network. CDN is a system of distributed network or server that deliver webpages or content to users after identifying their location or preferences.

When you host images, CSS or JS files through a CDN (cloud-based network), the content will delivered to the user quickly. Content delivery networks are extremely useful for B2B interactions. They accelerate mobile content, dynamic content and ecommerce transactions effectively.

Pain Point 2- Magento 1 version has a tedious 5 step checkout process

At Suyati, we have customized the long 5-step checkout process offered by Magento 1 version for some of the global leaders. If you have budget restrictions that do not allow you to immediately make a switch to Magento 2, we are there to help you. Our Magento customizations are tailored to convert the 5-step checkout into a 1 step checkout within no time!

What you need to take care of while implementing one step checkout process in Magento?

Make the checkout process more responsive

It’s good to know that you have a highly responsive website. But is your checkout process mobile-friendly and responsive? Rather than browsing for products, most of the customers try to complete their transactions using mobile. Un-optimized images, complex navigations, and multi-step checkout process make 88% of smart phone users leave your ecommerce application.

Never present your customer with a perplexing and long form at the checkout time. Understand that it is difficult for mobile users to tap and fill such exhaustive forms and they tend to abandon the cart at this juncture.

Make the progress indicator simple and supportive

As they proceed, customers need to be informed about their progress with respect to purchase and transaction. If the progress bar indicates that the customer still has 5 more steps to complete, they easily get frustrated and leave the cart. Moreover, if they aren’t given clear cut indication at each stage, they might even lose trust on your application.

Integration of multiple payment options

Customers love to pay at their convenience. Integrate the most common methods of payment so that it is easy for your customers to perform transactions at their will. For example: integration of PayPal is a must because of the security and convenience it offers. Similarly, give options to the customer to pay with payment wallets, COD, major bank credit/ debit cards, net banking etc.

Keep it short and simple

Once the user adds the items to the cart and clicks the purchase option, it is not a good practice to show them with other product recommendations and suggestions. At the checkout page, the user needs to apply a high level of concentration since they have already made up their mind to make the payment. Let the user focus on the transaction completely. Never show them pop up ads, newsletter subscription buttons, suggestions or other deviating promotional materials. This is also an added benefit for you since you receive less customer complaints on transaction errors and checkout hiccups. So, keep your checkout page clean and neat.

We have seen two major pain points addressed by Magento users and how to solve them. We would like to sum up a few tips that we probably failed to discuss above. Here we go:

For better SEO results, start your website URL with “www”. This improves your search engine visibility.
Restructure your pages judiciously to support and include third-party integrations.
Issues with your template can also lead to a poor UI. Even if your template is responsive, it will not give your users a smooth checkout experience. Customize your Magento UI to make it more responsive.
Integration of analytics- Use the most reliable analytics feature (like Google Analytics) to gauge the site traffic. If you integrate multiple tools to track analytics, it makes your website heavy.

Magento is a highly efficient ecommerce platform with lot of built-in and support features which makes your business scalable for future needs. A fast website/ application with simple and easy to follow UI can make a big difference in terms of user experience and ROI. In our next post, we will be addressing a different pain point faced by Magento users.

If you are facing the above/any pain points in Magento, talk to our experts straight away. Please write to services@suyati.com for more details.

Bhuvana Gopalakrishnan