An optimal eCommerce shopping experience depends a lot on the website’s performance, and the checkout page speed is the most critical factor influencing the customer experience. Magento 2 has been witnessing comparatively slow checkout page speeds in some websites when compared to Magento 1.x, and this is attributed to a lot of technical factors that influence the speed and behavior of the page. Let’s take a look at the top reasons for a slow checkout page in Magento 2.x. We shall also cover how you can optimize your Magento 2.x checkout page for a better customer experience the following article.
Low Checkout page speed can have a negative impact on your conversions, with cart abandonment and lesser return users being one of the most common effects of slower site performance. As users now actively using Mobile devices to shop, it’s all the more critical that you factor and eliminate low checkout speed in your Magento 2.x website to get the optimal benefits of a user-friendly eCommerce store. Since checkout pages are quite diverse and complex in their built, their performance would also vary based on active extensions, customization, and external factors such as hosting performance.
Intrinsic Knockout JS Scripts: Magento 2 uses a lot of Knockout.js in the checkout page, with multiple AJAX calls, and bulk JS code causing the page to load slower. This is one of the foremost reasons for a slower checkout page in Magento 2 and can be resolved by using Advanced JavaScript Bundling along with minifying the JS code.
Third-Party Extensions: Third-Party extensions that give your store the required functionality would surely positively impact your store’s features, but if you use too many overlapping extensions, you can have the checkout page chocked with multiple integrations that heavily slows down the page. You can try checking them to use only the required extensions with the desired functionality, so that speed doesn’t get impacted.
Multiple Pricing Rules: If you have multiple cart pricing rules set-up for the same products, it would surely impact your checkout page speed as Magento determines the price in the shopping cart after individually parsing all the pricing rules. If you have accumulated a lot of pricing rules that are no longer being used, it’s highly advisable to inactivate them to allow faster checkout without any overlap of the pricing information.
The same logic also applies for your Catalog pricing rules. It’s advisable to maintain uniform and updated pricing rules for your catalog and only activate the required rules.
Multiple Shipping Methods: Multiple shipping methods are often used to give customers the flexibility in choosing their shipping option, but this can turn counter-productive if you have many relatively unused shipping methods that are not frequently used. In the checkout process, Magento would contact the shipping carriers through an API to fetch the shipping prices for the mentioned address, with each call to individual shipping carriers consuming considerable time when put together-before the final price is calculated and displayed.
If you have multiple shipping methods that you see your customers not opting much, it’s recommended to disable them and continue with the carriers that you really need, so that you can save on time in the checkout page.
Checking Active Countries: Magento has an option to select countries to which you would ship and this option can also be extended for a particular shipping carrier. If you do not correctly select the “Ship to Applicable Countries”, and “Ship to Select Countries” options in the dashboard, this would cause a lot of API calls during the checkout-which would be unnecessary and consume time. The best way is to identify and implement your shipping countries and associate them with specific carriers.
Multiple Payment Methods: Multiple payment methods give your users the flexibility to opt for a chosen payment method, but you would definitely see a trend in their usage. We suggest removing certain payment methods that are not frequently used, or using extensions that combines their usage functionality, so that your Magento server doesn’t have to run API calls to all of the available payment methods before completing the checkout process.
For all the options we saw while optimizing for unused shipping, payment methods as well as pricing rules, it must be observed that though each step would take a few seconds to execute, but all of them put together would have a significant lag in your checkout page speed. If you are in a doubt on ways to optimize them, we strongly suggest checking your usage statistics and approaching a professional Magento development agency to optimize your checkout page functionality.
The impact of Hosting performance-using a CDN: The speed of your website’s hosting server also has a significant impact on your overall site’s performance-which also affects the checkout. If you have optimized on all the above aspects and still see a dip in your performance, it’s highly recommended to upgrade your hosting to a Magento supported hosting provider, and also use Content Delivery Network for fast rendering of your website.
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