Maintaining your eCommerce store requires regular care and maintenance, but one often neglected aspect is checking configuration issues. Configurations may become disorganized after adding new functionality or changing an extension, and no one bothers to verify them before moving forward with implementations or modifications on their site.
Adobe Commerce, eCommerce web solutions, provide businesses with an effective platform to establish, manage, and optimize online stores - offering features and tools designed to enhance customer shopping experiences and boost sales.
While configuration issues are usually easy to address, they can have a devastating effect on a site's performance and security. Your store could crash during holidays or increase traffic spikes; bad customer experiences could result in abandoned carts and damage your brand's image if addressed during maintenance. Therefore, configuration issues must be thoroughly evaluated during the upkeep of your store.
This blog will discuss the five Ps to consider when optimizing an Adobe Commerce store for peak performance. These suggestions require minimal time but must be prioritized to keep pace with competitors for peak sales traffic.
Understanding Adobe Commerce
Adobe Commerce provides a flexible and scalable commerce platform enabling businesses to deliver unique B2B and B2C experiences across their brand portfolios, regardless of the number.
Adobe Commerce Cloud (ACC) provides an innovative end-to-end commerce solution. It is designed to offer companies an accessible, flexible, and scalable end-to-end platform for managing, personalizing and optimizing commerce experiences across every touch point and throughout their customer journey.
Adobe Commerce Cloud was built on Magento, an open-source eCommerce platform written in PHP. Magento Open Source allows anyone to download, host and customize while their Enterprise versions (Magento Commerce On-Premise and Magento Commerce Off-Premise) provide managed solutions.
Magento Commerce (the enterprise offering, not an open-source version of Magento) is taken a step further by Adobe Commerce Cloud to make it possible to integrate with Adobe Experience Manager seamlessly.
Below are key Adobe Commerce features:
Sell anywhere
Your Customers Want to Buy Anywhere Give your customers the freedom and flexibility to shop whenever, wherever and however they please with Adobe Commerce's easy cross-channel shopping experiences, adding new brands/websites/geographies/selling customers from a single platform.
Manage and deliver
Adobe Commerce allows you to craft end-to-end shopping and purchasing experiences at scale with tailored promotions, seamless omnichannel fulfilment options and self-service convenience, resulting in higher conversion rates and average order values.
Optimize and Measure
Create an engaging shopping experience by arming yourself with insights and tools needed to customize it in real-time, such as personalized dashboards and business reporting - without IT assistance!
Scale, Extend and Support
Gain the control and flexibility necessary for innovation without compromising security. A team of certified global integrators provides support resources while driving high-value commerce experiences while reducing technical overhead.
Adobe Commerce features are enhanced by its global ecosystem of implementation partners, an expansive marketplace of extensions, and third-party integrations, giving you endless customization possibilities for eCommerce customization.
5 Configuration Fixes to Maximize Peak Sales
We will explore five common configuration issues here:
Issue 1: Standard CAPTCHAs
Standard CAPTCHAs in Adobe Commerce require shoppers to fill out forms that verify they are human rather than bots, adding multiple clicks to the purchasing process and increasing abandonment rates. When multiple CAPTCHAs must be completed at once--such as when accessing account details--they may become less likely to come back altogether.
Impact: Higher cart abandonment.
Solution: To simplify your site for visitors while protecting against spammers, we advise installing Google reCAPTCHA on it. reCAPTCHA allows customers to be validated simply by clicking a checkbox.
Issue 2: Cacheable Variable Set to “False”
Adobe Commerce development services recommend caching pages to improve site performance, with optimal results achieved with CDN usage. But what happens if none of your pages are caching when they should? Your storefront could experience significant losses in performance as a result.
Impact: Decrease in performance due to failure of website pages to cache.
Solution: Fortunately, if pages aren't caching as intended, the cause could likely be something as straightforward as configuration issues. Whenever any block in a layout is designated as uncacheable, all pages within it become uncacheable - meaning adding cacheable="false" into default.xml layout would turn off all caching entirely! Test this configuration thoroughly so all CMS, Catalog List, and Product View pages can be cached successfully.
Issue 3: Unnecessary Reindexing
When your site constantly flushes and rebuilds its index, its web storefront may become significantly slower. Furthermore, frequent reindexing adds locks on tables that reduce performance even further. If your website is frequently reindexing due to admin functions like
● Product Attribute Save
● Website/Store View Save
● Store Configuration Save
Impact: Your online store is running extremely slowly and continuously reindexing itself.
Solution: One simple way to avoid performance issues associated with reindexing is to execute these actions outside business hours. If that does not resolve the problem, look at any third-party extensions which might also be contributing to full reindexing.
Issue 4: End-of-service for minor releases
Adobe Commerce's development team strives to offer you and your customers maximum levels of security and performance with each release of Adobe Commerce. We regularly release patches to address emerging vulnerabilities or enable access to helpful new features without waiting for a new version release; keeping up with patches is the best way to protect your site while taking advantage of recent functionality and performance upgrades.
If your site is experiencing performance issues due to not receiving patches for Adobe Commerce versions older than its end-of-service deadline, these issues could have serious repercussions.
Impact: mounting quality, security or performance degradation due to noncompliance.
Solution: Resolving this issue is relatively straightforward; all it requires is upgrading your commerce application to the latest supported release. By staying current with new releases, you can be sure of having access to the most up-to-date features, functions, and security patches available.
Issue 5: Out-of-Date Magento Quality Patches
Magento Quality Patches (MQP) is a self-service tool that makes applying individual patches easy; it enables you to use, reverse, or find information about all available patches for Adobe Commerce versions. To stay up-to-date, update your MQP package regularly or risk missing important functional or security updates.
Impact: Your Adobe Commerce version needs updates and fixes in your Magento Quality Patches (MQP) package.
Solution: Addressing this issue is straightforward. Ensure your MQP package is updated before viewing or installing patches, and Adobe strongly suggests testing new patches before releasing them into live production environments.
Who Should Consider Adobe Commerce?
Adobe Commerce Cloud was developed as a way for both B2B and B2C businesses to benefit. Suppose your organization requires significant customization or uses multiple Adobe products. In that case, Adobe Commerce Cloud provides advantages by giving you access to a hosted website with numerous eCommerce development services integrated with Adobe Experience Manager.
Adobe Commerce Cloud may only be suitable for some merchants; Adobe is marketing it more as an enterprise product than Magento Commerce is targeted toward the midmarket. Many lower and upper mid market businesses may find that the cost associated with Adobe Commerce Cloud, along with all of the development work necessary to get it up and running and maintain it, is not worth it; for these organizations utilizing a SaaS platform that enables customization while having lower total costs of ownership may be the better choice.
Consider what matters to your business when making this calculation. What are your priorities and must-haves? Can they be met on a platform which will reduce tech spending and free up funds for innovation, or is customization truly required? Only you know the answers to such questions.
Conclusion
Who could fail to notice that peak sales seasons in business!? Whether it's festive occasions or holidays, online stores see increased sales as people spend more during celebrations or leisure time online shopping.
However, if there are issues in your online store or it doesn't function as intended during peak sales season, you could incur significant revenue loss. Thus, to be prepared for it successfully during this period of peak sales activity, you should resolve all existing issues and fix all pending ones before that timeframe.
These issues may manifest as discernable "symptoms" in your store, necessitating technical investigation. An Adobe Commerce developer with extensive expertise is recommended to perform all these configuration checks during store maintenance to maximize speed, security and usability and make your store user-friendly.
