How to Optimise Magento Front-End for Optimum Performance

Many online web stores recurrently face cart abandonment issues which affects the overall business with decreased ROIs and lesser brand value. If your Magento web store loads in less than 3 seconds, then your website is already high-performing.

What happens if your site take a longer time to load? What are the repercussions? This article will put all your worries at bay as we guide you along some sure-shot solutions in front-end Magento website design and development that improves your overall performance and gives you a consistently performing and optimised web store that your customers will love.

Slow loading websites attract less customers. Currently, 18% of shoppers abandon their carts without making any purchase as they are frustrated with a slow loading website. Such slow sites are also neither on Google’s favourite list or any other search engines and have reduced chances of getting indexed by them.

Now, how do you increase your Magento website performance for better outcomes?

Four important aspects of rendering optimised website pages in a Magento website include:

Reducing the number of HTTP requests
Optimising JavaScript
Optimising CSS
Optimising Images

Below, we explain in detail on how to overcome these hurdles with effective front-end website design solutions for optimum Magento performance and to boost your sales figures.

Reducing the number of HTTP requests

When a web page is loaded, every stylesheet, script and images on the page has to make separate round trips from the browser to the web server in order to get displayed properly. For this reason, due to the latency time taken for each component to travel back and forth between server and browser (HTTP requests), the speed of the page to be loaded is delayed and hence causes a hindrance in user interaction.

To overcome such delays and reduce the number of HTTP requests, one effective thumb rule is to combine all the scripts and CSS files into as many less files as possible to reduce the total number of requests rather than executing each HTTP request differently. However, this becomes tedious if the components vary from page to page.

Merging CSS files in Magento

1. Login into Admin panel.

2. Go to > Configuration > ADVANCED > Developer > CSS Settings

3 .Opt for ‘Merge CSS files’
4. Click ‘Yes’

Merging JavaScript in Magento

Similarly, you can also combine all JavaScript files into one.

Opt for ‘Merge JavaScript’
Click ‘Yes’

One done, you can see the difference in the below image.

Optimising JavaScript

Optimising JavaScript for your web pages can be done in innumerable ways. Here, we mention some ways in which you can optimise your JavaScript codes and in the process get a smooth and hassle free page rendering across different server locations.

Using CDN

Instead of changing your web application to suit a distributed architecture, it is always feasible to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) wherein your content can be dispersed across multiple geographically located servers for easy and faster web page access. It is a fact that most of the response time of users is spent downloading the different components on a web page like stylesheets, images, CSS and many more. Thus, dispersing your static content first marks a significant reduction in the response time and so deliver content more rapidly to users.

Safely setting up Tracking Scripts

External Scripts like tracking scripts (such as Google Analytics etc.) need to be safely set up in order to avoid blocks during page load and other event handlers on the web page. This is so because these scripts present in the head or body section of the html page stop the rendering process of a page on a browser as and when the browser encounters script tags while reading a page from top to bottom. This in return will block other scripts present on the page because some scripts have the ability to modify a page, add variables or add other additional scripts to the page which directly affects the page load time. Hence, to avoid these scenarios you can:

Include the script tag at the bottom of the <body> section
Include the script codes after a load event
Include asynchronous tracking codes

External Services Inclusion

Social media buttons are some popular tools for a webpage today. Hence, it becomes necessary to optimise page loads with their presence as people use these buttons often during their browsing sessions. A better option is to include the code for all social media requests under one script and include it at the end of the code of your page just above the </body>.

Defer JavaScript

The process of deferring the JavaScript code signifies that the page is completely loaded and then the code for the JavaScript is parsed for faster page load time. Such codes do not effect the performance of the page but only reshuffles the entire loading process for optimum results.

Recommended Reading: Optimised Checkout Pages To Fight Cart Abandonment

Optimising CSS

The best way possible to optimise your CSS files is to place them in the <head> section of a page rather than at the bottom. Some important rules are:

Include not more than once external CSS stylesheet
Avoid inline CSS
Avoid @import calls
Include small CSS in style tags above-the-fold content

Optimising Images

Evade use bigger images as you can always set the width and height of the image in html. In addition, having a favicon.ico under 1k is beneficial. This favicon.ico usage is unavoidable as browsers always request them and cookies are sent every time for such requests. So it is better not to return an error page during such requests.

The steps mentioned above may help you get better traffic though not necessarily increase your ROIs for your business.

If you have any queries related to Magento website development services or how you can increase the ROI for your business do not hesitate to call the Synotive experts today!