Mirasvit Blog

What, in your opinion, online shoppers find critically important when they choose a website for their purchases? Do you think what factor drives competition among e-commerce website developers?

You would be wrong if your answer is product choice or customization.

Today, every customer compares all websites based on their shopping experience.

Do you know what two heartbeats are? They are not only two movements of your body's most crucial muscle but also a desired web page speed. Yes, you read it right — half of the internet surfers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. Just two heartbeats may be the tipping point for your potential customers. To put it: Can your site speed have a drastic effect on your conversions? The answer is yes.

The significance of site speed is impossible to underestimate – users are becoming more and more demanding, Google is penalizing websites with low page load speed. According to Radware research, 3 seconds download speed web page in comparison with 1 second download time web pages, has 22% views less, bounce rate higher by 50% and 22% less conversion. While 5 seconds web site (comparing to 1 second) 35% fewer views, 105% higher bounce rate, conversion 38% less. As you see – the faster your website downloads, the more money you get. Magento 2 stores have the specific list of actions for improving site speed you can take at the very start and we are going to share it with you.

Checkout page is one of the key parts of your e-commerce store. Your sales are directly dependent on its usability and convenience. Even the smallest shortcoming or error can significantly harm conversation rate.

The most common way is to select so-called "one-step checkout extension", which brings all order elements (such as shipping, billing addresses, shipping & payment methods, etc.) to the single page. It simplifies order placement and makes it much easier for a customer.

There are 5 essential facts about customer satisfaction and trust level importance:

• Customers twice more often share their bad experience, than good one
• You must work 12 times harder to cover 1 customer poor experience
• New buyers cost your store 6-7 times more to acquire
• The probability of selling to an existing customer is way more than to a new buyer
• Loyal customers are 10 times more valuable, than their first purchase.

The significance of site speed is impossible to underestimate - users are becoming more and more demanding, Google is penalizing websites with low page load speed.

According to Radware research, 3 seconds download speed web page in comparison with 1 second download time web pages, has 22% views less, bounce rate higher by 50% and 22% less conversion. While 5 seconds web site (comparing to 1 second) 35% fewer views, 105% higher bounce rate, conversion 38% less.

As you see – the faster your website downloads, the more money you get. Magento 2 stores have the specific list of actions for improving site speed you can take at the very start and we are going to share it with you.

Rich Snippets aren’t google ranking factor and doesn’t allow directly improve links positions in SERP, but they allows greatly improve CTR (click-through rate) and traffic.

Using Rich Snippet for e-commerce allows you to significantly increase the CTR in SERP and as a result attract more customers to your store.

In Magento 2 only two of six key snippers are supported, and it is obviously not enough.

SEO Meta templates are designed to automatically generate META information for catalog pages based on predefined rules.

Meta Templates can be applied for following pages: Category page (product listing), Layered navigation pages and Product pages.

It’s not a problem to manually fill meta information for few dozen products and categories. In other hand, if you have few thousand products it can be nightmare. Moreover you can’t configure meta tags for layered navigation pages, Magento 2 just doesn’t have such functionality.

During several years we have been studying and implementing various approaches to improve the speed of store server and frontend.

For an online store, the most important aspect is the operation speed. And here, it is important not only how fast a server returns a page to a client (TTFB), but also, how quickly the client can download this page and all related resources (files js, CSS, images, fonts).

The speed of operation is one of the most significant factors which affects the SERP ranking in search engines (Google, Bing, etc). The faster a server generates the page and a client downloads it, the higher your website is in the search results at all the other things being equal.

When a customer knows what he needs to buy, his first action is to find the product through a quick search. The presence of a quick drop-down menu with the found goods (auto-complete) allows him to find the right product quickly without leaving the search line. The customer has only to complement the search query with the necessary criteria and then he will see the result.

Customers expect that search results will be shown instantly (they know experience of Google or Amazon search). But technically it is very hard to achieve such level of speed in Magento store. Every request to Magento needs to initiate magento core, which speed of initialization limits the speed of our search.

To solve this problem and to greatly speed up Magento search, we have created and added a new feature to our search extensions. We named it the Fast Mode.