Scaling Your eCommerce Business with Magento: Tips for Growth

When Magento launched more than 15 years ago, it was a small startup with relatively few users. It grew quickly, and as it grew, the business had to scale up to handle the demands of a growing userbase. Eventually, 10 years after launch, Magento sold to Adobe for $1.68 billion. That kind of scaling and growth is the dream for many business owners, and the good news is that Magento itself is designed to help eCommerce businesses like yours grow and scale as demand for your goods and services increases.
In this article, we’ll take a look at some tips and tricks to help you leverage Magento to help grow your business. But, before we begin, a word of caution: While Magento is designed to support scaling, it’s not enough simply to make a bigger website or add pages with Magento. Scaling effectively involves a bit more work, including optimizing performance, improving user experience, and ensuring robust back-end infrastructure. Even if you have created your own website without professional assistance, during the scaling process you may benefit from consulting a Magento agency to help connect with a professional developer who can handle the challenges of scaling your eCommerce business.
Once you are ready to start scaling, there are a few things you can do to help leverage Magento for growth:

Optimize Web Speed and Performance

As your website grows, it will need more resources to maintain the speed and performance your customers have come to expect. One of the first things you’ll need to do is optimize for speed and performance when you scale your business. Use Magento’s built-in caching features like Full Page Cache (FPC) and Redis so page load times will stay low. This will reduce server load and make it easier for your customers to access your pages. Similarly, you can deploy a content delivery network (CDN) to serve static content like images, CSS, and JavaScript from geographically distributed servers to help reduce load times no matter where your customers are located. Optimizing images and media to avoid long load times for overlarge image or video files is another way to speed up your site for maximum efficiency. Finally, regular cleaning and maintenance of your Magento database, especially when you have a large product catalog, can help retrieve data faster.

Deploy Magento Extensions Strategically

A growing eCommerce business needs strong communication, so deploying extensions like the newsletter service MailChimp for Magento can help you to stay in touch with your customers and send them offers that will bring them to your site. By using marketing extensions effectively, you can automate much of your marketing and make it easier to communicate with your customers with minimal effort. Beyond this, when you have a large and growing catalog, you can use search extensions like ElasticSearch or Algolia to provide a more robust and intuitive search experience to help connect customers with the products they are most likely to buy. If you have not already done so, you’ll want to integrate extensions for payment services like PayPal, Stripe, or Authorize. Net to ensure your customers can pay in the way that is most convenient for them. Consider deploying a one-page checkout extension to reduce cart abandonment.

Optimize the User Experience across Platforms

Most businesses run their eCommerce from desktop or laptop devices, and as a result, they tend to think about their websites in terms of those platforms. But over the past few years, the number of customers accessing eCommerce sites from mobile devices has surpassed those using desktop or laptop devices. As a result, it’s important to deploy mobile-first design and to optimize your site for customers accessing it by smartphone or tablet. Additionally, customers have come to expect that businesses will personalize their shopping experiences so that they are customize for their needs and interests. Consider using personalization tools like Nosto or Magento’s native product recommendations to track your customers’ shopping behavior and recommend relevant products and services.

Be sure your hosting service is scalable

As your website grows, you will need more hosting space for your website. That means that you will need to have a hosting service that can handle your growing Magento eCommerce site. You may want to use a service like Magento’s cloud solutions (Magento Commerce Cloud) or another scalable cloud hosting service like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud so you can increase your hosting space as needed without having to worry about the limitations that come with physical hardware.