One of the biggest complaints about Magento is slow page load times. Slow page loads can be a huge thorn in your side, especially during the holidays. It’s the time of year when customers become increasingly impatient and unforgiving. In a 2009 study commissioned by Akamia Technologies, researchers found that 47% of online shoppers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% will abandon a site that takes 3 or more seconds. The study also found that while waiting for pages to load, 14% of shoppers will begin shopping another site and 23% will stop shopping or walk away from their computer. So….if you want customers to stay on and buy from your Magento site, your Magento site needs to be fast.
A default Magento Store installation, without caching enabled, serves single pages in approximately 3.45 seconds. Enable caching and that time drops to approximately 3.1 seconds. Even with caching enabled, a default Magento installation cannot serve up pages in the time that customers expect pages to be fully loaded. Note that these times are just the time it takes to request a page from the server and for the server to respond. They do not include the time it takes to transfer images and to render the page.
So what are you to do? A simple answer—LightSpeed.
When benchmarking a default Magento installation with LightSpeed installed, dynamic pages were served in approximately 0.25 seconds and static pages were served in about 0.10 seconds. Images still need to be transferred and the page rendered, but the odds of pages being loaded under the customer-defined threshold of 2 seconds are greatly increased.
The bottom line is that LightSpeed is the best way to get content to your customers, fast. The faster their page loads, the more likely they’ll be to keep shopping your site. Don’t risk losing customers this holiday season because your Magento site is too slow.
Don’t take our word for how fast LightSpeed is. Check out LightSpeed reviews on Magento-Connect.
TinyBrick is offering 15% off LightSpeed as a little holiday-gift for you. Enter the promo-code “MAKEMEFAST” in your cart and enjoy. As a note, you won’t see the discount immediately, but you will see it in checkout. This is a limited release promo-code so it’s first come, first serve. Hurry, get yours before somebody else does.
