Tips for getting your Magento Store ready for the Holiday Season

The Holiday Season for 2020 is on the way and this season promises a surge on online sales when compared to the past years due to the global effects of the pandemic. In the coming times of heavy online traffic and sales, is your Magento website ready to tackle the load? Take a look at these important tips that would help you determine the holiday season readiness for your Magento website, and also ways to improve it to get to the mark.

Take a performance Audit: A overall performance audit of your Magento website is important to get yourself ready for the holiday season. Check the performance of your front-end, UI/UX, backend, and 3’ party integrations as well as the website loading time. Do check on factors that would hinder the page loading speed and try to optimize them.

1. Slow pages are one of the biggest reasons for abandoned shipping carts, so try to speedy your website pages
2. You should also check for any latest functionality that has been introduced recently so that you can spend more time tuning then troubleshooting your website.
3. The holiday season are the best time to freeze your code so that there would be no updates or installations that would impact your customers.
4. Do pay attention to the responsiveness of your website, as close to 55% of the traffic is estimated to come from mobile devices.
5. You should also check the SEO score of your website and see for any room for improvements.

Improvement Tips for Magento websites during the Holiday Season Using a CDN: If you have not already used a CDN, now is the time to enroll for one so that your website load gets effectively balanced. This is all the more important if you are having global customers or heavy traffic. Using a CDN effectively decreases your loading speed by up to 50%.

Remove Unused Modules: The Magento installation comes with several modules that might at times not be used in your website.  Make sure to identify such modules and remove or disable them from your website so that the overall performance is not affected. 

Optimize Cache and files: You should ideally be using Redis or Varnish for your web page caching for effective performance. Ensure to use minifying tools to reduce the size of images, JavaScript files and pages so that they are fast to load and easy on access. Keep in mind that page loading speed not only impacts user experience, but also has a direct impact on the search engine rankings for your website. 

Use Production Mode: At times, there are websites that still run in development mode, so make sure to switch to the production mode to ensure optimal performance. 

Using Elastic Search: For Magento 2.4 installations, its required to use the Elastic Search as the catalog search solution. Using elastic search greatly impacts the search functionality, making it more user-friendly and faster for your customers. Keep in mind that a well optimized and technically tuned website is the key for getting more online traffic and conversions during the holiday season. If you find that your website is still slow after following the above recommendations, do get in touch with us so that we can conduct a free audit of your Magento website and update you on the areas of improvement.