Magento site: 6 essential tools for measuring web performance
Magento is the reference web solution for selling your products online. How to measure the performance of your Magento site ? It is important to measure the webperf, or web performance , of your store. The results of this analysis then allow you to make the necessary adjustments to optimize your site. You will be able, among other things, to improve its loading speed, and benefit from the beneficial effects for your conversion rates and your Google SEO. This analysis allows you to evaluate the loading time of the pages, and therefore the user experience, and more generally the behavior of your site. Many free or paid tools are available online. Let’s take a look at the 6 essential tools for measuring your webperf.
Why measure the web performance of your site under Magento?
Competition is now fierce between online sales websites. SEO referencing and display speed are among the key elements of online business success. You must therefore collect precise information on the web performance of your site in order to improve it, especially if you want to sell products, services, or even online training.
Internet users want immediate access to the information they are looking for online. Studies show that a site should not take more than 3 seconds to display its pages (source Google). The experience offered by a company on the Internet must therefore take this notion of performance into consideration, and this involves rapid display, the responsiveness of the pages, in other words, and good loading times.
Knowing your loading time, image display time, server response time, etc. must therefore be part of the company’s marketing strategy. The tools, some of which are made available by Google, allow you to measure key data such as:
- server response time;
- image display time ;
- click responsiveness, or interactivity;
- the loading time of all the resources useful for displaying the contents on the page…
As you will have understood, the shorter the access time to the content, the more you capture the attention of Internet users and develop your online sales with engaged and loyal customers.
Analyze the loading speed of a web page with PageSpeed Insights
PageSpeed Insights is an online tool developed by Google. It evaluates the display speed of a page of your website, and detects the elements slowing down the loading of content on the tested page. It also offers suggestions for improving loading time, both on a computer and on a tablet or mobile phone. Among other things, the tool collects data on the browsing experience of real users, and you can also compare your performance to that of your competitors’ sites, and optimize it if necessary.
PageSpeed Insights shows the page performance score tested. It must be at least 90 to be considered good by Google. A score between 50 and 90 must be optimized and the loading speed improved. Finally, a score below 50 is considered poor.
The score reported by Google via PageSpeed Insights is calculated based on the following web performance indicators:
- First Contentful Paint: The moment when the very first byte is loaded by the browser.
- Speed Index: Loading time of elements above the fold.
- Largest Contentful Paint: Time taken to display the largest content element on the page.
- Time To Interactive: time it takes for a page to become interactive in a sustainable way and without latency.
- Total Blocking Time: Cumulative period of time during which a browser cannot respond to user interactions.
- Cumulative Layout Shift: a measure of the visual stability of a web page.
All of these measures are applicable to each page of your site, regardless of the content (text, images, videos, etc.). This gives you the ability to check the performance score page by page.
Check your performance with Lighthouse
Lighthouse is also one of the free tools made available by Google . It allows you to check the performance of your pages: loading speed, SEO, accessibility, application of good web practices, Progressive Web App criteria. The results are presented in the form of scores between 0 and 100. This analysis allows you to detect the failing points of your Magento site, and tells you which points to improve for optimal use and experience on your web application or your website by Internet users.
Lighthouse can be launched manually from the Chrome browser, and you can take advantage of this open source tool via integration as a Node module for continuous automatic analysis. Lighthouse does not need to be installed on your computer to run and report information that will be useful to you to optimize your loading times.
This audit tool is integrated into Chome DevTools. You can then obtain an analysis of your pages and directly access your results. Simply download Chrome on your PC or Mac, open DevTools, and go to the URL of the page to audit on the website of your choice. Open DevTools with the functions Ctrl+Shift+i (PC) or ⌥+⌘+i (Apple), click on the Lighthouse menu located at the top of the page. You can then configure your audit according to your needs before launching the analysis of the page.
Note: The page will automatically reload several times before the report is displayed on a new page.
Analyze a web page with the WebPageTest tool
Available online and free of charge, WebPageTest is a tool for checking the performance of your pages. . The tool returns a lot of data that will allow you to understand in detail what is happening during the loading of the web pages you are testing: time required to load the different resources (images, scripts, CSS, etc.), scores and performance measurements (Speed Index, Core Web Vitals, etc.). This tool is very comprehensive, it is a reference in the webperf community, and it requires some knowledge on the subject to fully exploit it. The information it provides is particularly useful to developers, technical teams, etc. thanks to the depth of the analyses it allows to be carried out.
WebPageTest offers many options that allow you to precisely observe the steps of loading a web page, by choosing the test conditions: browsers (Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Edge, Opera, etc.), network quality (Edge, 3G, 4G, fiber, ADSL, etc.), geographic area, device model (entry-level or high-end phones, etc.). You will thus be able to carry out precise measurements by type of browser, device and network conditions, depending on the conditions that best match those of your users.
Measure your performance with Dareboost
Dareboost provides a lot of information about your website, but also about those of your competitors. The tool gives you access to recommendations for improving your page, both in terms of loading speed and SEO, to also boost your user experience and your natural referencing. Dareboost allows you to test your site in desktop and mobile versions. Analysis of competitor sites is also possible. Depending on the subscription packages, you can benefit from a daily or constant analysis of your website, and an alert system in the event of an incident or deterioration of your performance.
Dareboost tells you, among other things:
- the list of images whose weight slows down the loading of pages, and therefore the user experience;
- scripts that cause problems loading your pages;
- fonts not recognized by Google and which may cause a display problem…
Dareboost offers a score calculated on the basis of hundreds of criteria and control points, by a dedicated analysis engine.
Identify what’s slowing down your site with GTMetrix
GTMetrix is easy to use. With this tool, you can identify the elements of your web page that are not optimized for the rapid display of your page. By copying the URL address of the page to be tested into GTMetrix, you launch a complete analysis, and you obtain recommendations on the actions to be taken to improve your score and your performance. The points of improvement are categorized according to the importance of their impact on the loading times of the pages of your Magento site: optimize the weight of images, reduce the number of requests per page, optimize HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, reduce server response time, etc.
Review your performance with Pingdom
Like its competitors, Pingdom is a performance analysis tool available online. Pingdom provides statistics on data relating to the performance of the page. The page score is between 1 and 100 and specifies the loading time of the page, the number of requests, the weight of the page and the files that compose it…
Pingdom is a simple and effective tool for a developer with advanced technical skills in optimizing web pages. All he has to do is take all the results displayed by Pingdom to improve:
- the page display time;
- the weight of files (especially images);
- management of redirects (301 among others);
- unused or need-to-be-updated plugins.
All of these tools now allow you to analyze a website in its entirety, page by page . In the same way that you probably use Google Analytics or Google Search Console to measure your traffic, these 6 tools help you go much further in the complete analysis of your website and its overall performance. The analyses and data thus allow you to optimize the complete management of your Magento site.
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