Magento Imagine is less than a week away. Kicking off May 13th, this year promises to be a big one, with merchants exploring how to “Expand the Experience”.
And NexcessLive is back for another incredible party and the chance to talk with merchants about how we can help them to optimize the eCommerce experience.
If you haven’t already, keep reading to see what we’re going to be doing to keep the party going outside of the Wynn, and see if scheduling a time to talk is right for you.
The NexcessLive Party – May 13th
The Hostdedi Live Party is a chance for you to let loose and channel your inner golfer – regardless of how well you can actually golf.
Taking place at Topgolf Las Vegas, from 7:30 pm – 10:30 pm, enjoy complimentary drinks, hors-d’oeuvres, and take the chance to go club to club against the Hostdedi team. If golfing isn’t your thing, don’t worry. We’ll have a pro on standby to help you learn, or you can just enjoy the ambiance of the cabanas.
Transportation will be provided from the Wynn at 7:00 pm and then back from Topgolf at 10:30 pm. All guests will also receive a bonus golf-themed gift set, with more than a few luxury surprises.
This year, we’re invited BigCommerce along, who will be providing a number of prizes. This includes:
A Nintendo Switch
A Moleskin Eclipse + Set
A GPS Golf Smart Watch
An Oculus VR set
Interested in getting your hands on one of them? Three will be raffled off and one will be offered to the winner of our golf-themed competition.
Reserve your spot on the guest list today. Places are limited.
The Suites Meetings – May 14th
Besides being a great chance to get off your feet during conference hours, the Suites Meetings let merchants demo new Hostdedi innovations and see how we can help you to realize the promise of Magento.
Interested in scheduling a time? Click here and let us know what works for you.
Make the Most of Vegas
You might be in Vegas for one of the biggest eCommerce conferences of the year, but don’t spend all your time with Hostdedi. Make the most of your time in Vegas by exploring a little. Swing by the casinos, view some of the city’s unique and interesting shows, and soak in the atmosphere of one of the world’s most luxurious cities.
Unsure about where else to go? You might be able to get some good suggestions from the Hostdedi team on unique places which usually fly under the radar. Just ask. Rigo knows some great restaurants.
Conversion rate is an important indicator of the health of an eCommerce store. An eCommerce store is, essentially, a machine for converting visitors into buyers. Whatever other roles an online retailer’s site has, its ability to move people through the purchase funnel determines whether it can be considered a success.
Typically, conversion rates are compared over time: Is this month’s conversion rate better than the same month last year? But it is also useful to compare conversion rates to industry averages, answering a different question: Is my store performing as well as the competition and the eCommerce market generally?
What is a conversion rate?
A conversion rate measures the proportion of visitors to a store who buy a product. In fact, the definition is broader than that, covering any event in which a lead responds favorably to a marketing message. But, for eCommerce retailers, a sale is the most important conversion and a good measure of a store’s efficiency — although conversion rate has limitations as a performance indicator, as we’ll discuss in a moment.
A conversion rate measures the proportion of conversions relative to the number of visits in a given period.
(Number of sales / number of visits) * 100
If a store has 13,000 visitors in a month and makes 400 sales, it has a conversion rate of approximately three percent.
(400 / 1300) * 100 = 3.07
Three percent of visitors to the store bought something.
What is a good conversion rate?
The most accurate answer to this question is — it depends. But that’s not very satisfying, so let’s look at the industry average. According to Econsultancy’s Performance Benchmarks, the global average is between one and three percent. The store in the example calculation above is successful by that measure; its conversion rates are at the top of the average range. In fact, most stores have lower conversion rates. If your store is somewhere in that range, you shouldn’t be too worried, although there are other factors to consider.
The limitations of conversion rates
Conversion rates are important, but they are just one metric among several that eCommerce retailers should monitor. To take an extreme example, an eCommerce store that receives ten visitors a month and makes eight sales with an average order value of $1.50 has a conversion rate of 80%. That’s an excellent conversion rate, but it doesn’t bode well for the business.
An increasing conversion rate indicates that a greater proportion of visitors are buying products. That might mean conversions are increasing as total visits remain static (good). Or it might mean that conversions have stayed the same while traffic has decreased (not so good). Or it might mean some mixture of the previous two possibilities.
The store owner can’t be sure what their conversion rate says about the health of their store without viewing it in context with other metrics, including revenue, average order value, and, perhaps most important, profit.
Magento is still one of the best eCommerce platforms available for merchants looking to optimize the eCommerce experience. Between incredible functionality and unrivaled product management, it provides the ability to create storefronts that can’t be created in other, comparable applications.
In 2018, we found that the top reason merchants chose Magento was functionality. Yet great functionality requires a lot of server resources. As a result, Magento is a known resource hog.
Luckily, with over 10 years of experience supporting Magento stores, we understand the application’s complex performance requirements. In fact, we even wrote the book on the subject. For this reason, merchants continue to choose Hostdedi for reliability, security, and performance.
Interested in learning more about how we create Magento environments you can’t find anywhere else? This article looks at four of our optimizations and how they make your store faster with Hostdedi.
PHP-FPM
PHP code lies at the foundation of Magento, and there are multiple ways that a web server can be configured to execute that code. Even minor changes to default configurations can lead to significant Magento performance improvements.
Usually, when you install PHP support on a web server, an apache module called mod_php is set up. This module offers a simple set of configurations that will provide a Magento installation with the type of performance you’ll see with any web host.
We don’t accept the default mod_php file configurations. Instead, we use PHP FastCGI Process Manager, commonly known as php-fpm, on our servers.
PHP-FPM allows Magento sites to make use of memory and CPU resources more efficiently than its mod_php counterpart. This helps Magento sites to better manage content and serve websites faster.
In additional, we optimize the mod_php setup so it makes the best use of memory and CPU resources. Usually, a mod_php setup is also configured so that each Apache httpd process also contains a copy of the PHP interpreter. This inevitably means a larger memory footprint – even for Apache threads serving requests for static assets.
Under our configuration there are separate PHP processes to serve dynamic requests so the web server can serve only requests for static assets. This also allows us to tune settings related to how these processes behave to improve responsiveness or reduce memory footprint.
A Fine-Tuned OPcache
PHP is an interpreted programming language. This means that when PHP code is executed it must be parsed by an interpreter. This interpreter organizes the code into an internal representation that can then be executed by the PHP runtime.
Parsing must take place within the interpreter before the code can even begin to run. Usually, parsing repeats every time a request is made. That means that every time someone visits a new page on your site, the parser kicks in.
This is where OPcache can help. OPcache helps by saving the internal representation of the code so it doesn’t need to be parsed for each request. For an application like Magento, which has tens of thousands of PHP files, this translates into a significant performance improvement.
As part of our strategy for optimizing performance for Magento, we’ve tuned the settings for OPcache to support a large number of compiled files. This translates to less time spent parsing PHP code and more time spent running useful code that helps customers access your Magento store.
NGINX-Based Cloud Accelerator
One of the biggest resource demands on any eCommerce store is the delivery of static assets such as images, CSS, and JavaScript. On default Magento configurations, these assets are delivered through Apache after reading the file on disk.
By implementing built in microcaching using NGINX, static assets can be stored and served directly from memory for a short period of time. This is particularly useful for highly trafficked stores that have a selection of very popular products, with NGINX meaning that each visitor page load is faster and uses less server resources.
Nginx also provides HTTP/2 protocol support, which allows for optimizations such as server push, where a web server or web application can tell a browser to download additional assets in response to a request.
Traditionally a browser would not start downloading additional assets until it encountered them during a page load. Server push means a browser can be told to download static and other assets immediately.
In addition to these optimizations, we also have compression enabled automatically for relevant assets. This means that instead of serving a raw JavaScript, css, or other test file, we transparently and automatically compress the file so the download becomes smaller. This results in a significantly faster overall page download time.
As an example, the latest version of jQuery, a popular javascript library, is 86 Kilobytes in an uncompressed state. Compressing this with gzip yields a 30 Kilobytes file, or savings of over 65%.
Automatic Processing Priority
All multi-tasking operating systems have a mechanism called a CPU scheduler. This component determines which tasks are allowed to use the CPU at a given time and to what extent. On Linux, this is done by assigning a “niceness” value to a process. The value is called this because it determines how “nice” the process is, or how big a share of CPU resources that process will get. The idea is that nicer processes use less CPU resources.
Hostdedi has created a system that automatically changes the niceness value of running processes so that web critical processes (NGINX, apache httpd, php, mysql, etc) get CPU priority over less critical tasks. (compressing files, backups, etc).
Additionally, we run most maintenance tasks with a low CPU priority. This helps ensure that your website responds quickly even when administrative or scheduled tasks are running.
Get Started With Optimized Magento
Magento optimization starts on the server and finishes in the application. Server optimizations can help to provide merchants with a solid foundation for creating the Magento experience they want, but the development process is still vital.
We always recommend testing new code and implementations on a dev site before you push to your production site. Dev sites allow Magento merchants and developers to test speed and performance in a secure environment.
Interested in learning more about how we help merchants to optimize the eCommerce experience? Visit our Magento hosting page to see what features come with a Magento install.
Magento Imagine is less than a week away. Kicking off May 13th, this year promises to be a big one, with merchants exploring how to “Expand the Experience”. 
Magento is still one of the best eCommerce platforms available for merchants looking to optimize the eCommerce experience. Between incredible functionality and unrivaled product management, it provides the ability to create storefronts that can’t be created in other, comparable applications. 
