Most Costly Adobe Commerce Problems – And How to Fix Them

A lot of different factors are involved in the development of an eCommerce website and it is ultimately those same factors that will decide the fate of your business. They will also play a large role in  how users are going to interact with or find your website. 

In this blog, we are going to share the most common issues encountered with the Adobe Commerce platform that your team might be experiencing and how to solve them. If you want to learn a little more about the powerful and exclusive money-making features of Abobe Commerce check out our blogs The 5 Most Valuable, Exclusive, Money-Making Features on Adobe Commerce and Future Proof your Webstore with Adobe Commerce 2.4.5

Slow Performance

Having a fast-loading, high-performance website is crucial to your eCommerce business. Why? Because the speed of your web pages play a vital role in your user experience, conversions, and Search Ranking. Unfortunately, too many eCommerce merchants place a priority on having a site with too many bells and whistles and an overly sophisticated website design, all of which slow the site rendering speed. 

A slow-loading site can cause major conversion rate issues that dramatically affect your sales.  Some extensions (and extension providers) are notorious for breaking Adobe Commerce’s cache and not working properly with JS bundling and CSS/HTML minification.  These extensions can create very slow page loads and poor performance across the site.

Your site speed is important for the overall user experience you are trying to create and if your site takes a long time to load (especially on mobile) causing impatient customers to leave your site, increasing l your overall bounce rate and reducing the average time spent on your site. Slow loading sites also get lower SEO scores from Google and affect your business’s conversion rates; which further exacerbates the problem. In fact, the highest eCommerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 0-2 seconds, with nearly 70% of consumers admitting that a page speed beyond this impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer, according to a study by Portent. 

Every extension should be reviewed by a senior developer before being installed and a full regression test and possibly a load test of the site should be performed before releasing the extension to production. For more information on factors that might be affecting your site speed, check out our blog, Perfect Page, Poor Traffic? Why Site Speed Matters. 

Conflicts

For the eCommerce teams that do not plan their websites correctly, it is easy to go overboard and install extensions that affect your website’s functionality. That can be easy to do with the 3,800 extensions that the official Adobe Commerce Marketplace offers. This is because sometimes it’s not possible for all 3rd party extensions to be tested against one another. They also might not be of top quality which may hinder your customer’s experience. Another conflict your team might be experiencing is incorrect database configurations. If you are using Magento 2.4 or above, it is essential that your team upgrade your database to MySQL 8; which can take your performance to the next level. According to a report, this database upgrade can improve the performance of a website twice as much as its previous versions.

To help stay on point with your sales strategy while improving your performance and experience on your website, the solution to this issue is to ensure that full regression testing and load testing are routinely performed before releasing any extension into production. In addition, you can set indexers to ‘update on schedule’ rather than ‘update on save’ to help eliminate Adobe Commerce performance issues in case of large volumes of traffic, especially around the holidays or other particularly busy times. 

Support

Sometimes extension providers are slow to respond to support requests or they simply stop supporting their extension.  Although not common, we have seen this happen several times in the past.  The most significant impact can be when an extension provider decides to stop supporting their extension altogether.  This means the merchant is forced to either pay a developer to keep upgrading the extension to match overall site upgrades or replace that extension with something else.  

One of the most popular extensions to lose support recently has been the Ultimo theme.  This extension was used by many merchants, all of whom were left with no support when the Ultimo theme developer decided to no longer support or upgrade their theme.

The recommended solution to this issue is to only purchase extensions from the bigger and more well regarded providers like Aheadworks or Magefan who have more resources for support and are not likely to fold up shop anytime soon.

Solutions

Slow loading pages, especially for mobile users, are by far the most important and costly of the issues outlined above when it comes to improving conversion because these issues involves not only a lot of quality assurance testing, but the following interdependent processes:

• Analyzing all 3rd party extensions and custom code to find which modules are causing performance issues.
• Any necessary work to resolve those issues (replacing modules, refactoring code, etc.).
• Full regression testing of the site to ensure the resolutions work properly.
• Identifying any unused or bloated Javascript code causing performance issues.
• Any unforeseen work that might be required to remove/replace or refactor Javascript code.
• Full regression testing of the site to ensure the proper functionality is in place based on the above task. 
• Minimize CSS/HTML and Javascript
• Full regression testing of the site again.
• Work with full page caching and CDNs to further optimize page loads and image sizes etc.
• Full regression testing of the site again.

Bringing it all Together

Before proceeding to make any changes to these third-party codes or any performance issues, it is important to make sure you understand where the bugs and issues reside and how to fix them; which can quickly turn into a larger task than originally anticipated. That’s where we come in. It’s vital to have a team of experts that understand your needs and who provide the right solutions to help you stay at the top of search results and ensure a better return on your investment. Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to talk.