Category: Administration

From time to time we receive complains from our customers for the slow speed of their Magento 2 stores. They ask us to help them to solve the speed problem. In this article, we tried to collect our experience and share a few hacks regarding fixing Magento store cache system.

It’s a very rare occasion that a store is slow because of a weak server. In most cases speed issues are related to a poor quality of some extensions or custom code inside your store. So to solve the problem and fix it, you need to spot the root causes. Let’s start with some basic info on the cache workflow and it will greatly help us later.

404 errors occur in all online stores. And it’s OK. New pages are added, old pages are removed. However, things go bad when the number of 404 errors becomes very high.

First of all, although 404 errors do not directly impact a store ranking on SERP, they consume already limited crawl budget. Thus, they bring you unnecessary losses.

Secondly, the only fact of 404 errors presence negatively influences customers’ impression.

Imagine the situation: any user visits your store and gets a page with 404 error. He/she does not obtain the required content and, consequently, starts hesitating. In most of cases, he/she does not keep searching for the information on your store but rather prefers not to make any purchase.

Usually new Magento releases bring some bug and security fixes as well as new features and improvements. Releases have a lot of changes. With each release, Magento changes one or a few digits in the version number (e.g. from 2.3.1 to 2.3.2).

When a customer buys from your online store, he has certain expectations when it comes to service level and customer support response times. Investing time and resources in enhancing customer support affects sale rates and your company's reputation.

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.

Unlike in Magento 1, cron performs critically important tasks in Magento 2. In the native installation there are 26 modules that use cron for 53 different jobs. You can get acquainted with the full list of modules below on the text.

Practically, all reindex processes work in cron process. Newsletters, product alerts, page cache etc

Moreover, most of the third-party extensions use cron and some extensions simply do not run if the cron is not configured or operates in the wrong way.

We suppose, no one needs a proof that communication with customers is decidedly important and that a quick response to a users’ questions strongly affects the conversion rate in any store. At present, it is not enough just to tell everything on the site pages - many potential customers prefer to ask than to look for the necessary information on the store pages.

Since the first days of mirasvit.com (since 2012), we have been actively used Zopim chat (now it is named Zendesk Chat). About a third part of our customers ask questions before placing their orders and as much ask after the purchase is completed.

We have a few questions to you: How often do you update your store? How often do you install a new extension on it? How often do you change settings configurations or make changes to the theme?

What makes a successful ecommerce store? Well, of course, the right answer would be high quality product; however, in reality, this is by far not a complete answer. The excellence of the customer service is just as important, if not even more. Still not assured? Numbers do not lie: 55% are willing to recommend a company due to outstanding service, more so than product or price. Unfortunately, many online merchants underestimate the importance of the Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) when it comes to the customer service.

Many of you are familiar with our brilliant extension Sphinx Search Ultimate. But what do you know about Sphinx itself? Today i would like to introduce you Steve Barker a Community Manager at Sphinx, who will tell us details and facts about Sphinx open source search server.