21/07/2025
… minutes read
In eCommerce, every millisecond counts. Did you know that a one-second delay in mobile load time can slash your conversion rate by up to 20%? That’s the kind of business-crushing inefficiency we see all too often with Magento stores. The good news? It doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s talk about how to supercharge your Magento store’s performance, delight your customers, and boost your bottom line.
Magento is a powerhouse in eCommerce, offering flexibility and scalability few other platforms can match. But with great power comes complexity. Magento's architecture allows customisation through event hooks - trigger points where developers can add their own logic to extend functionality. Sounds great, right?
Here’s the catch: Many extensions from third-party vendors hook into events that fire frequently, such as “order placed.” The more extensions you pile on, the heavier your site becomes, dragging down performance.
It’s tempting to throw a quick €100 at a plugin to add new features, but this “easy” solution often leads to a bloated, sluggish site. A Magento store loaded with ten different plugins? You’re almost guaranteed a performance bottleneck.
Let’s be honest: Magento’s default theme is outdated. Its technology stack is a relic, leading to inefficient development workflows and subpar performance. Enter Hyvä, a modern replacement for Magento’s default theme.
Hyvä doesn’t reinvent the wheel but replaces it with a turbocharged one. By leveraging a modern tech stack, Hyvä delivers:
Performance by Default: Thanks to its lightweight architecture.
Developer Efficiency: Cutting-edge tools mean faster, cleaner code.
Using Hyvä is like upgrading your eCommerce car from a rusty hatchback to a sleek sports car. It’s faster, more efficient, and ready to handle the demands of modern shoppers.
If your Magento store is struggling, the culprit likely falls into one of these three categories:
Your marketing team may not realise the damage a 5MB image in the homepage slider can do. Magento doesn’t optimise these assets by default, leaving your store to suffer under the weight of poorly managed content. Additionally, marketing tools like Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, or heatmap trackers can cripple load times if improperly configured.
Caching tools like Redis and Varnish are essential to running a fast Magento store, but they add complexity. Hiring a PHP developer who doesn’t know their way around caching layers can result in misconfigured systems that hurt performance rather than help it.
Magento’s synchronous processes - such as order confirmation emails and payment processing can bog down performance. These tasks don’t need to happen instantly and can often be shifted to an asynchronous queue using tools like RabbitMQ.
A client, PromoCell, came to us with a painfully slow front-end. Their Magento store had a performance score of just 40–54 in Lighthouse, with frustrating load times that were costing them conversions.
Here’s what we did:
Upgraded the Hosting: Implemented a robust private setup with RabbitMQ and a properly configured database.
Optimised Caching: Introduced Redis and Varnish, configured for maximum efficiency.
Implemented Speculation Rules: This browser feature preloads potential next pages, making navigation feel instant.
In just one or two hours of optimisation, we boosted their Lighthouse performance score to an impressive 87. Load times dropped by several seconds, significantly improving the user experience.
Performance isn’t just a technical concern, it’s a revenue driver. Here’s the data to prove it:
Imagine your store generates €100,000 a month in revenue. Improving your site speed by just 0.1 seconds could add €8,400 to your bottom line every month. That’s €100,800 annually - just for optimising performance.
To recap, optimising your Magento store comes down to three things:
Use themes like Hyvä to ensure performance is baked in.
Configure caching tools, shift workloads asynchronously, and maintain a lightweight codebase.
Bridge the gap between marketing and development to avoid user-content pitfalls.
If you’re not investing in your store’s speed, you’re leaving money on the table. Let’s fix that.
At run_as_root, we specialise in building and rescuing Magento stores. Whether it’s improving your Core Web Vitals or untangling a web of conflicting extensions, we’ve got you covered.
Let’s talk. Your customers and your bottom line will thank you.
Chat with David about your Magento store and how to improve its performance.
08.07.25
10.06.25