Everything is cacheable: Boosting e-commerce site performance

Everyone shops online these days - and everyone expects instant results when they start their online shopping journey, whether in simply searching for products or getting personalized recommendations. A lot of technical work is going on behind-the-scenes to enable this seamless shopping experience, but the end-user doesn’t need to know… and certainly doesn’t need to experience the delays that come along with many major e-commerce platforms. 

As a part of the drive to attract and retain customers, e-commerce sites built on all platforms have added more functionality, often functions delivered by third-party technologies, without really gauging what these “improvements” will do to site performance. Retail Systems Research published a report earlier in 2018 examining the performance of 80 top retail websites, evaluating page speed performance, and revealed fairly damning information: most sites’ performance was even worse than they concluded in the previous year’s report, and mobile, which is growing more important all the time, is “embarrassingly slow”. The report concludes what any online shopper can tell you: all the added functionality makes no difference if pages don’t load fast enough to satisfy a user’s demand. 

Caching the uncacheable

One of the big problems with e-commerce sites and their performance challenges is that the more personalized the pages become, the more they become uncacheable. Caching is one of the key ways sites maintain brisk performance because pages and their elements can be saved and served up again without making long, time-consuming round-trips to backend servers to retrieve requested content. After all: “Static file caching is the bread and butter of the CDN industry and no one doubts its usefulness and performance enhancing ability.”

But e-commerce sites are fundamentally spinning on truly dynamic, individual content that’s served specifically to one user alone. Widely seen as uncacheable, personalized content has been taken as a necessary performance hit because major e-commerce platforms, such as Magento, have no magic caching workarounds, and the only purported solutions have required backend changes to the platform. Until now.

Varnish E-Commerce Accelerator

Being able to adopt a solution that requires no backend changes to Magento or other major e-commerce platforms - and simply works as a true, full-page cache with 100% of client response served from cache - is game changing. Varnish E-Commerce Accelerator does exactly this - accelerating performance and enabling superior user experiences because finally there is no trade-off between performance and user personalization.

You don’t have to choose between added functionality and performance any more. With Varnish E-commerce Accelerator, you get both. 

Ready to learn more about speeding up your e-commerce site with ease? Join our live webinar, Caching the uncacheable with Varnish E-Commerce Accelerator, on 25 July.