• Mistake #1: No Abandoned Cart Process
  

According to Baymard Institute, the average cart abandonment rate is 68.55%; that’s almost 3 in every 4 willing shoppers who abandon their cart without completing the checkout process. If you are currently earning $1.2 million in sales per year, your potential earnings would have been $3.81 million.

So, why do people abandon their carts? A survey conducted by VWO eCommerce determined that the number one reason is Unexpected Shipping Costs. However, if you have a follow up process in place that re-targets your customers with a slight discount,  54% of shoppers are willing to complete their transaction.

• Mistake #2: Not Collecting Enough E-Mails
  

Generating enough leads is one of the most crucial aspects of running any successful business. According to eMarketer’s study, 60% of businesses have difficulty generating leads. Capturing just 100 extra email addresses each month, assuming you have a 3% conversion rate with an average sale price of $100, you are missing out on an estimated $3,600 of additional revenue per year.

There are many creative ways to generate more leads from contests, digital eBooks, to prize drawings. Dean Zelinsky for example, the owner of Dean Zelinsky Guitars, generated over 14,000 e-mail opt ins through Fishbowlprizes.com in just a few months. Not only is it a fantastic and innovative solution to lead generation, but it also gives back to the community through charitable actions.

• Mistake # 3: Web Site Is Too Slow

Consumers expect very fast service such as Amazon Prime NOW, Netflix Streaming, even websites have to be fast.  A full 47% of consumers expected a web page to load in 2 seconds.  For every 1 second delay in page response you could potentially result 7% loss in conversions according to Akamai and Gomez.com. If your Magento store earns $1,000 a day, just an extra second could potentially cost you $25,500 per year!

So how do you improve your Magento store’s performance? Take a look at what Marketfleet did to make their site faster:

Marketfleet is an e-commerce based business in Chico, California that supplies and enriches its customers with luxurious but yet affordable products. As a growing business with multiple store-fronts which markets to the young and impatient, a solution was required to lower page load times for a better customer shopping experience.

With a motto of “Building Brands”, founders Chris Friedland and Dave Bonillas needed a Managed Magento Optimized Hosting Solution to focus specifically on their business, and took on the challenge to increase website performance. Marketfleet partnered with eBoundHost to engineer a custom Magento hosting environment based on the JetRails™ platform, to help to reduce page load times by almost 50% and improve time to first byte by nearly 10X.

Marketfleet Challenges & Pain Points

Marketfleet’s main challenge was to find a Managed Magento Hosting solution that offered the optimal speed performance . Prior to migration, based on a single user simulation, it took 3.374 seconds on average to reach the first byte of data and 7.404 seconds to load a page.

Engineered Solution with JetRails™

1. Initial performance tests were conducted and benchmarked throughout the site
2. A tailored hosting environment was  engineered, deployed & optimized
3. Current web files and database were copied into the new platform
4. JetRails™ integration & tuning (stack & cache optimization)
5. UAT – functionality tested and verified
6. DNS change
7. Seamless transition (no loss of data)
8. Performance tested and benchmarked

Results After Migrating to JetRails™

After being put in the Magento optimized environment, First Byte Time and Load Times were reduced to 0.341 seconds and 4.187 seconds respectively.

“Mostly server management, price, and speed were a few of the issues we previously had. They were the culmination of things that made us decide to change hosting, but everything has been great since moving to eBoundHost!”

Dave Bonillas – CoFounder
www.Marketfleet.com

CASE STUDIES Expert advice, guidance and solutions from ideas to creation.  Real transformations. Read Case Studies	MANAGED SERVICES Changing platforms is only the beginning.  Value added services keep you competitive. Learn More	PERFORMANCE TEST Out-of-the box isn’t good enough for your investment. Discover your bottleneck. Test My Site

Growers House is a family owned and operated hydroponics supply and indoor gardening center.  They have both a retail and online store based out of Tucson, AZ to service customers locally and globally.  It is their belief that old business practices are becoming a scarce commodity today.  Their goal is to provide customers a large selection, wholesale pricing, expert advice, comparison tests, and most importantly, customer service.  Growers House got in touch with us to help design and manage their Magento Hosting Platform because their current web pages took a long time to load.   The current Magento eCommerce platform that was used by GrowersHouse was not designed to accommodate the rapidly growing amount of traffic and the challenge was to provide an environment that could easily sustain 250 active clients without affecting performance.

After testing various pages we quickly discovered that the average time to first byte clocked in at 11.339 seconds and complete page load times ranged from 5 to 59 seconds.

After Moving To The Community 32 Dedicated Platform with JetRails(TM), page load times and time to first byte are faster than ever.  Rather than spending time taking phone calls about the site not working, GrowersHouse is now doing what they do best; taking care of customers.

Growershouse.com can now handle 250 active clients without compromising site performance with the Community 32 Dedicated Platform with JetRails(TM) Pro.

For a free in-depth speed and load analysis of your site, please visit:  http://eboundhost.com/magento/speed-test.php

“We sought a partner that not only appreciated our goals, but had the know-how to guide us in the right direction. eBoundHost was the perfect partner for this effort as their knowledge of Magento and knack for creating optimal user experiences is second to none.”

— David K, Director of Ecommerce, GrowersHouse

Jade Bloom was founded by a naturalist-centric group that whole heartedly believes the God-created earth contains everything we need for holistic healing and healthy living.  Their commitment to customers is to only provide the absolute best natural essential oils through quality control, proper distillation & extraction methods, and the use of clean and safe packaging materials and facilities.  There was only one problem:  Their Magento eCommerce platform was not designed to accommodate the rapidly growing amount of traffic and the challenge was to provide an environment that could easily sustain 150 active clients without affecting performance.

Load Time Results Before Migration to eBoundHost (Test data reported in seconds)

With 35 active clients on the site, page load times would start to climb.  Results would clock in anywhere from 9.59 second up to 1.7 minutes as traffic increased.

After Moving To The Community 16 Dedicated Platform with JetRails(TM), page load times and time to first byte are faster than ever.

Jadebloom.com can now handle 150 active clients without compromising site performance with the Community 16 Dedicated Platform with JetRails(TM) Pro.

For a free in-depth speed and load analysis of your site, please visit:  http://eboundhost.com/magento/speed-test.php

Divine Optics, one of America’s most fashionable sunglass & eyewear sites, has captured the essence of style by offering the most exclusive designs since January 2014.  Faced with the need to future-proof their e-commerce channels, Divine Optics approached eBoundHost with a request to engineer a hosting solution for their new Magento based website.  The goal was to serve 200+ simultaneous shoppers without affecting their experience.

Approach

To get at the heart of the challenge, our design and implementation teams interviewed key stakeholders, spent time with site developers, and thoroughly reviewed the divineoptics.com site. We analyzed page load times and server response metrics for both US and overseas web visitors. We used the data to develop a platform that would allow Divine Optics’  shoppers to experience fast page load times consistently. The ultimate goal was to provide an environment where customers move down the conversion funnel quicker.

Outcome

The result is a Magento storefront that performs as fast as the top 3% of sites around the world.  DivineOptics.com is now converting more visitors to paying customers.

Metrics After Successful Migration to the eBoundHost Community 16 Solution

Page load times on the eBoundHost Magento Community 16 solution are consistently low and increased visitor traffic has minimal impact on web site performance.  Conversion rates and customer satisfaction are at an all time high directly resulting in more profit for Divine Optics.

Speed Tests On eBoundHost Platform  

Page load times have improved significantly.  The site is now consistently loading between 2 to 5 seconds and the time to 1st byte is well under 0.300 seconds.

Load Test On eBoundHost Platform

The graph below shows consistent load times with an increase in concurrent traffic.  Even with 250 active clients, the load times are not affected.

Future Optimizations To Reduce Page Loads Times Even More

During our discovery process, we found additional areas that could help bring page load times even lower.  The next part of the process for Divine Optics is to optimize their images.  Once image optimization is complete there will be a significant additional improvement in overall site speed.

View video testimonial from NBLTextiles

The next site on our series of Magento site speed case studies is www.NBLtextiles.com.  We created a staging / development environment for making changes and configuring the site for optimum Magento site speed performance.  Working in a development environment is best practice as it takes the risk out of potentially ruining a live site due to any accidental misconfigurations.

We took a copy of the Magento speed test case study site from its live environment to the staging environment prior to starting our speed optimization process.  Once the speed configurations were successfully deployed in the staging environment, we launched them into the live environment seamlessly.

STEP 1.  Magento Site Speed Optimization Case Study Diagnosis
To properly diagnose the site, we need to understand its performance based on various speed parameters.  Based on several tests from GTmetrix, Pingdom, Google Page Insights, and Webpagetest to name a few, we discovered that the time to first byte for www.NBLtextiles.com was very high (between 4 to 12 seconds) and the pages took anywhere from 10 to 20 seconds to load.  Here is a product page that was taking over 18 seconds to load:

The site has several thousand products and hundreds of product configurations per item (color, size, etc.)  Each time a visitor views any product details page, the database needs to be accessed to pull all of the different configurations for the product.  This creates a bottleneck when a site of this nature is hosted in a shared environment with no specific Magento optimizations.

STEP 2.  Creating A Development Environment
Based on the specific results and website traffic patterns in our speed test analysis, we put the site on a Microcloud blade running Xeon E3-1230 V3 CPU, 16GB of RAM, with Samsung SSD hard drives in RAID 1.  Additionally, Nginx was added for static content serving to run along with Apache 2.2. Varnish was also installed and configured for super fast caching.  Here are the results once placed on an optimized Magento platform with eBoundHost:

The home page and details pages now load in under 2.8 seconds and the time to 1st byte is under 165 milliseconds. 

Product page results load 3.8 to 11.5 times faster with sub 147ms TTFB.

 A word from NBLtextiles.com:

http://youtu.be/hxXI39kNByY

More Comparison Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkc5PO2GOmu7ufo60tMmoGQ

Compare Your Magento Site:
http://magento1.eboundhost.com/magento-performance-comparison/

Free Trial:
http://eboundhost.com/magento-cloud-hosting/#compare

Brick-anew.com is an example of a website that was hosted by a company that specializes in Magento and claims to offer optimized solutions.  The slow speed concern was brought to our attention through the chat feature on our website.  Brick-anew.com was brought back on the right track after going through a hosting transformation.  Let’s examine the steps our team took to optimize this server so that we can fully understand how we achieved great speed results for www.brick-anew.com.

STEP 1 – WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DIAGNOSIS
The site was running at a slower speed from a general perspective and we knew that some further scope for speed improvement was left open for us based on our technical perspective.  The site was diagnosed and analyzed to find out the limiting factors which were slowing down the websites performance.

Lets look at just 3 speed reports prior to the migration to an eBoundHost Magento Optimized Dedicated Server:

1.  Home Page – Old Host                      Load Time: 6.015s    Time To 1st Byte: 3.067s

2.  Fireplace Doors Page – Old Host    Load Time: 5.407s    Time To 1st Byte: 2.271s

3.  Brick Paint Page – Old Host            Load Time: 6.008s   Time To 1st Byte: 2.245s

Initial Testing
We offered to benchmark the store on our platform prior to making any changes to the current site.  What this means is that we created a mirror copy of brick-anew.com and placed it on our server so that we could compare the 2 sites side by side.  Here are the initial results.  The test site loaded in only 3.8 seconds.

What eBoundHost Provided
We provided Brick-anew.com with a dedicated server, using hardware RAID-1 drives (SSD), 16 GB of RAM, and a top end Intel Quad Core e31230 v2@3.3GHz CPU.  RAID-1 was used for superior I/O (disk) performance, 16 GB of RAM was used for proper caching (MySQL).

The results were great, but as a group we decided to add Varnish & NginX to the equation and do some more optimizing.  The load times went down even further:

1.  Home Page, Optimized –                    Load Time: 2.222s    Time To 1st Byte: 0.125s

2.  Fireplace Doors Page, Optimized – Load Time: 2.542s    Time To 1st Byte: 0.139s

3.  Brick Paint Page, Optimized –          Load Time: 2.938s    Time To 1st Byte: 0.180s

CONCLUSION:
Thanks to properly configured Varnish cache, Nginx, and image optimizations www.brick-anew.com is now in the top 1% of fastest sites on the web.

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – Brick-anew.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Jarett E.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.

The Problem
Omgbuyit.com is an example of a website that was hosted by a company that specializes in Magento and claims to offer optimized solutions.  Omgbuyit would routinely see page load times that exceeded 14+ seconds.  The store has over 100,000 SKUs and concerns about using up too much RAM on the shared environments came to light.  Of course this lead to the ultimate question:  How many visitors were bouncing out of the site because it took too long to load?

Initial Testing
We offered to benchmark the store on our platform prior to making any changes to the current site.  What this means is that we created a mirror copy of Omgbuyit.com and placed it on our server so that we could compare the 2 sites side by side.  Here are the initial results:

What eBoundHost Provided
We provided Omgbuyit with a dedicated server, using hardware RAID-1 all SSD drives, 32 GB of RAM, and a top end Intel Quad Core e31230 v2@3.3GHz CPU.  RAID-1 all SSD was used for superior I/O (disk) performance, 32 GB of RAM was used for proper caching (MySQL).

The Results
We were able to reduce their page load times from 14+ seconds to under 7 seconds with proper use of caching and optimizations.  Time to 1st byte was reduced from 7.797 seconds to 0.399 seconds.

Here is a screenshot showing the old hosting 14+ second load time:

Here are the results after once hosted with us:

CONCLUSION

Optimizing this case study website was not as easy as it looks like from the report above.
eBoundHost has done some super-tweaking to achieve high speed performance levels.

Using a Magento Optimized host like eBoundHost offers much more configuration and tweaking  flexibility to gain more speed on any Magento site.

Omgbuyit.com got their website page time to 1st byte reduced from 7.797s to 0.399s, which is almost 20 times faster.  The fully loaded website time was also reduced by 54% from: 14.046s to 6.471s.

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – Omgbuyit.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Jarett E.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.

YunesSwathe.com is an example of a website that was hosted on a Non-Magento Optimized Platform.  The slow speed concern was brought to our attention via the Speed Test Request form on our website.  YunesSwathe.com was brought back on the right track after going through a hosting transformation.  Let’s take a detailed walk-through to understand what was done to optimize this Magento site for speed.

STEP 1 – WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DIAGNOSIS
The site was running at a slower speed from a general perspective and we knew that some further scope for speed improvement was left open for us based on our technical perspective.  The site was diagnosed and analyzed to find out the limiting factors which were slowing down the websites performance.

Lets look at the speed report prior to the migration to the eBoundHost Magento Optimized Cloud Platform:

First Byte Time – F
Keep-alive enabled – A
Compress Transfer – A
Compress Images – D
Progressive JPEGs -F
Cache static content -A
Effective use of CDN – X

As we can see here, this is a standard shared hosting server that is set up to cater to most php/mysql CMS (i.e. WordPress, Drupal, Magento, etc…) Kudos for setting keep alive to enabled and caching static content.  Of course it’s not enough to get the demanding Magento platform to load at a reasonable speed. That’s why we see a horrendous  2300ms TTFB here.

STEP 2 – TRANSFER WEBSITE TO MAGENTO OPTIMIZED PLATFORM
Through assisted migration, Yunesswathe.com was moved from a standard web-hosting platform to our Magento Optimized Cloud platform.

STEP 3 – LAUNCHING ON A PRE-CONFIGURED PLATFORM
Once website functionality and performance were carefully verified, A records were pointed and the site seamlessly switched over.  A new beginning for Yunesswathe.com.

RESULTS:
Let’s look at the new report after migration:

FACTOR                          BEFORE CHANGE          AFTER CHANGE            RESULT
First Byte Time                                F                                             A      GREATLY Improved
Keep-alive enabled                          A                                             A                              Neutral
Compress Transfer                          A                                             A                              Neutral
Compress Images                            D                                             F                           Needs Work
Progressive JPEGs                          F                                              F                              Neutral
Cache static content                        A                                              A                              Neutral
Effective use of CDN                       X                                              X                              Neutral

We have achieved substantial improvement in time to 1st byte and page load times.  CDN was not chosen by YunesSwathe.com’s Admin for this particular situation due to the geographical location of their target market.  Now the next step was to make sure that the developers for YunesSwathe.com were aware that they have the option to optimize their images for better performance.

CONCLUSION

Optimizing this case study website was not as easy as it looks like from the report above.
eBoundHost has done some super-tweaking to achieve high speed performance levels.

Using a Magento Optimized host like eBoundHost offers much more configuration and tweaking  flexibility to gain more speed on any Magento site.

YunesSwathe.com got their website page time to 1st byte reduced from 2.229s to 0.161s, which is almost 14 times faster.  The fully loaded website time was also reduced by 57% from: 10.298s to 4.448s.

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – YunesSwathe.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Jerry T.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.

Magento Website Speed Optimization Case Study – nursejamie.com

Nursejamie.com was an example of a website that was hosted on a Non-Magento Optimized Platform.  The slow speed concern was brought to our attention via the Speed Test Request form on our website.  Nursejamie.com was brought back on the right track after going through a hosting transformation.  Let’s take a detailed walk-through to understand what was done to optimize this Magento site for speed.

STEP 1 – WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DIAGNOSIS
The site was already running at a good speed from a general perspective, but we knew that some further scope for speed improvement was left open for us based on our technical perspective.  The site was diagnosed and analyzed to find out the limiting factors which were slowing down the websites performance.

Lets look at the speed report:

First Byte Time – F
Keep-alive enabled – A
Compress Transfer – F
Compress Images – F
Progressive JPEGs -F
Cache static content -F
Effective use of CDN – Y

STEP 2 – TRANSFER WEBSITE TO MAGENTO OPTIMIZED PLATFORM
Through assisted migration, Nursejamie.com was moved from a standard web-hosting platform to our Magento Optimized Cloud platform.

STEP 3 – LAUNCHING ON A PRE-CONFIGURED PLATFORM
Once website functionality and performance were carefully verified, A records were pointed and the site seamlessly switched over.  A new beginning for Nursejamie.com.  No hiccups, just pure improvement.

RESULTS:
We checked the websites speed once again.

FACTOR                          BEFORE CHANGE          AFTER CHANGE            RESULT
First Byte Time                                F                                             B                            Improved
Keep-alive enabled                          A                                             A                              Neutral
Compress Transfer                          F                                             A                            Improved
Compress Images                             F                                             F                              Neutral
Progressive JPEGs                          F                                              F                              Neutral
Cache static content                        F                                              A                            Improved
Effective use of CDN                       Y                                              X                              Neutral

We have achieved substantial improvement in time to 1st byte, compress transfer and cache static content.  CDN was not chosen by Nursejamie.com’s Admin for this particular situation due to the geographical location of their target market.  Now the next step was to make sure that the developers for Nursejamie.com were aware that they have the option to optimize their images for better performance.

CONCLUSION

Optimizing this case study website was not as easy as it looks like from the report above.
eBoundHost has done some super-tweaking to achieve high speed performance levels.

Using a Magento Optimized host like eBoundHost offers much more configuration and tweaking  flexibility to gain more speed on any Magento site.

Nursejamie.com got their website page time to 1st byte reduced from 0.867s to 0.337s, an average of 62% improvement on a relative performance scale.  The fully loaded website time was also reduced from  5.100s to 2.233s, an improvement of 56%.

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – Nursejamie.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Denis Z.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.