All Magento 2 experts know that the volume of sales depends on the site performance heavily. Every second of delay in the site response results in a massive loss of sales and users.

Shoppers can wait up to 3 seconds only for the site to load – not more than that. So if you feel like your Magento store has become slower than usual and your sales are dropping, it may be a sure sign that you need a performance audit. 

A performance helps identify your site’s soft spots and the reasons they drag the performance down. Let’s have a closer look at the audit anatomy and see how it impacts your business.

Why does the audit matter so much?

The answer is in one word: sales.

Every time your store acts slowly, users lose patience or are not able to complete the action. This inevitably leads to a decrease in conversion and hence, sales.

So it’s safe to assume that your store performance directly impacts your revenue. Now when we are clear on that, let’s move on to the possible reasons why your store underperforms.

Key factors that affect site load speed

Performance of your store means how fast and responsive the site is and whether it functions smoothly, with no bugs.

Magento is quite a massive platform with advanced functionality. However, there are well-tried ways to speed up your Magento store and achieve smooth and fast performance. We’ll describe the store optimization in detail below.

Now, what are the reasons your site is so slow and bulky?

It may be:

• Useless extensions and plugins;

• Poor code;

• Unused scripts;

• Heavy images/videos;

• Lack of caching;

• Lack of updates;

• Server configurations.

These are not all the reasons that impact the site load speed. However, these are the most common ones that many e-commerce store owners face.

The existence of such issues depends on the development team that you have worked with.

Magento 2 experts usually make sure the site can perform equally well regardless of the server load, Internet connection, and user’s device.

How to speed up your store

You need to conduct the following actions:

Use tools for caching

The most popular caching tools for Magento are usually Redis and Memcached. Caching allows saving time on the page load by extracting the ready elements from the cache. 

So if you don’t use the caching tools yet, it might be time to integrate one.

Get rid of useless elements

Magento allows easy and smooth integration with third-party services – and it may come at a high price.

Check whether your store has any unused plugins or extensions. Though seemingly small, these elements can cause the site to slow down.

Check the code

Complex code results in slow and rough performance. So if you have any suspicions about the code quality, better double-check it and see whether it can be optimized.

Code optimization usually results in immediate store speed-up and boosts the performance greatly.

What does the performance audit include?

If your store needs help in terms of speeding up, it’s time to perform an audit. Of course, you can check some things independently but a comprehensive audit from professionals will bring much better results.

In general, a site performance audit includes the following steps:

• Analysis of the main store pages;

• Identification of the biggest pain points;

• Suggestions on server optimization;

• Suggestions on data load optimization;

• Suggestions on image and theme optimization.

Now let’s move on to the most important question: what benefits does the audit bring?

The definite pros of the performance audit

It may seem that the performance audit is not a big deal and can be conducted by your in-house developers.

However, it will be better to pass the audit to the company with rich experience in Magento development. Such companies tend to be more accurate to details and are able to provide the best options based on the cases that they already resolved.

The audit uncovers the most obscure issues with your store and provides actionable recommendations on its optimization. Once the issues are identified, the agency should be able to solve them – and you will see the performance boost in no time!