This article was originally written by Avanade alum Vimal Mukati.

Adobe Commerce is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms available today. However, to maximize the potential of your e-commerce store, you must optimize it for success. By optimizing your online store, you can enhance the user experience, increase your website's visibility, and boost your conversion rates. This, in turn, leads to increased revenue and growth for your business. So, if you want to stay competitive in the ever-growing world of e-commerce, optimizing your store is not an option, but a necessity.

In this article we will cover some tips for optimizing your Adobe Commerce store so that you can maximize its potential.

Update Adobe Commerce: The easiest way to speed up your Adobe Commerce website is to regularly update your Adobe Commerce backend, as well as the theme and extensions you use. Adobe Commerce periodically launch security and performance updates and to be on the current version gives you the chance to leverage those new updates. For example, Adobe Commerce’s latest version 2.4.5 does support PHP 8.1 (a big change from PHP), and it states that after adopting the latest PHP version, the store performance can be improved by up to 15-20%. This shows how important it is to keep the store up to date.

Reduce or remove unnecessary Extensions: Adobe Commerce was created to be flexible and meet the needs of even the most demanding users. To assure this flexibility, the system separates each feature so that altering one would not impact the others. As a result, each time a user visits an online store many files are read from thousands of archives and this flexibility indirectly contributes to its flaw, poor performance. Therefore, it is crucial to minimize the number of extensions and ensure that you have only useful ones installed.

Improving site speed and performance: Improving site speed and performance can lead to a better user experience, increased conversions, and higher search engine rankings. This can be achieved through various methods such as utilizing CDN, right caching techniques, web application firewall, image optimization, etc. Adobe Commerce cloud comes with Fastly that enables all these important features and behavior. For the on-premises commerce version, you may go with the third-party available services like Cloudflare, Fastly, Stack Path, etc. By implementing these strategies, you can significantly improve the performance of your Adobe Commerce website and give your customers the best possible shopping experience.

Implementing a mobile-first approach: As the number of mobile users grows, businesses need to adapt their websites to be able to provide an optimal experience for them. Key elements of mobile-first design include responsive page layouts that adapt to the screen size of a customer’s device, responsive methods of organizing information, and tools that create a better experience for the customers. Adobe Commerce comes with Progressive Web App (PWA). With Adobe Commerce PWA Studio, you can transform the mobile experience and help merchants to improve conversion rates, boost search rankings (SEO), lower development costs. A PWA eCommerce platform uses a variety of performance optimization and responsive design strategies to load content fast on any network and provide a consistent experience across all platforms.

Find out how Avanade is enabling clients to create a more flexible, customizable future for digital experiences with Adobe technology.