Improving the speed of Magento requires multiple actions that are often technical, but not always. In fact, the gains in speed also take into account your habits as site administrator! Guillaume Thibaux, co-founder of Quanta Computing, spoke during Magento Live France 2015. In his presentation, entitled “7 Lessons learned for Magento’s Performance”, he focused especially on the impact that actions taken in the back-office have on the front office. Do not empty your cache at any moment, because the consequences on your conversion can be significant. Explanations.
Limit the use of your back-office
“On thay day of sales, try to go into your back-office as little as possible”, says Thibaux. This piece of advice, sometimes known (but rarely implemented), is not pointless. “You have to use the back-office as little as possible, especially when you are in a period of peak activity. Connecting onto Magento’s back-office generates numerous queries on the database. These requests, which are more or less heavy for the system, can slow down the entire system.” Unfortunately, the performance is not only affected on your end, but there are also impacts on the front office.
“If a report on visits and conversions during the last week takes some time to generate, you can wait at your computer, this is not a big issue. The problem is that since there is a significant query on the database, this waiting will also affect your visitors. You then impact their navigation experience and in that moment you kill your conversion rate”, explains Thibaux. “This is the case, for example, when you update your catalog.”
Actions on the back-office, consequences on the front office
Notice in the illustration the impact caused by the update of a product in the back-office on a site running on the Magento Enterprise solution and Full Page Cache. The operation clears the caches, which requires a new calculation with each new click on the site. Much performance is wasted (slower speed) and potentially conversions too. “We have already seen Magento sites that are completely inaccessible for 15 minutes following an intervention in the back-office while traffic was high.”
To continue reading, we recommend our article “How Does Speed Impact Conversion on E-commerce Sites?”