A fast site is now in fashion, be fashion forward!

After coming back from the Magento Imagine Conference in Vegas, it was very clear that the fashion industry is exploding online.  The demand and growth of this segment is large enough for Magento to recognize and even demand its own presence.  This peaked the curiosity of many online retailers so we analyzed and tested 50 Magento fashion stores to see how they performed and uncovered some shocking data.

4 quick facts to know before we get into the data:

1.  Every third shopping search on Google is related to fashion!
2.  The fashion e-commerce segment may touch $35 billion by 2020.
3.  Fashion related queries are growing 66% year over year.
4.  Conversion ratios in women’s fashion are by far the lowest  (1.85%)

Overview:

With this segment growing so fast, its no wonder that conversion rates are low.  More competition, more traffic, and fewer hours in the day have caused some e-commerce stores to leave money on the table.  We will review the data gathered from 50 Magento fashion sites (25 Enterprise & 25 Community) and discover what can be done to generate more revenue and increase conversions using simple mathematics and two simple words that are under-used: SPEED INDEX.

Speed Index is the average time (in milliseconds) at which visible parts of the page are displayed.  This measures how quickly the page contents are visually populated (lower numbers are better).  It is useful for comparing experiences of pages against each other (before/after optimizing, my site vs competitor, etc) and should be used in combination with the other metrics (load time, time to first byte, etc…) to better understand a site’s performance.

Average time to first byte:  1.997 seconds
Average fully loaded time:  8.041 seconds
Average speed index:  4842

Out of 50 Magento fashion sites, the fastest performer was a Magento Community store on JetRails™.  The speed index clocked in at an amazing 1321 (3.6 times faster than the average), time to first byte is 0.259 seconds (7.7 seconds faster than the average) and the fully loaded page time is 2.908 seconds (2.7 times faster than the average).

What is JetRails™?
JetRails™, by eBoundHost, is a fully managed and highly optimized hosting platform built to accelerate website content delivery with sub-second response times, ensure platform uptime beyond industry standards and provide a fully hands-off managed experience.  JetRails™ customers spend more time growing their business and less time managing servers.

Improving Magento Speed Index:
Based on the data, let’s review some important observations.
1.  Magento Community and Enterprise Editions are prone to performance bottlenecks.
2.  For the most part, the lower the TTFB, the lower the speed index is.
3.  Apache, Nginx & Litespeed are prone to sub-par performance if not configured correctly.
4.  JetRails(TM) blows the competition away.
5.  Most web hosts can only do so much for speed, unless they can configure JetRails™.

Test your Magento speed index and performance metrics for benchmarking.

If your Magento store can use performance tuning for higher conversion rates, visit eBoundHost.com/magento for a fully managed and optimized platform or call us at 888-554-9990.

Tom P May 28, 2015