Section Blog - Empowering Developers at the Edge

Each year, more and more people conduct their shopping online, buying everything from holiday gifts and clothing to household essentials and even groceries through websites or mobile applications. Several trends have emerged out of this shopping phenomenon, including online-only businesses which undercut brick-and-morter costs and subscription services that send goods monthly.

For years, companies have been turning to Content Delivery Networks to address all their website performance needs, from page speed and scalability to security. Caching content globally, which originally was the main purpose of CDNs, has undoubtedly helped create a faster and more scalable internet, but are CDNs living up to their lofty promises? Is it possible to achieve excellent website performance by simply using a CDN? Does the performance improvement offered by most CDNs justify the thousands of dollars they cost a month?

The section.io Australian contingent is excited to be attending MagentoLive Australia in Sydney from November 7-8th. As an Australian-founded company with offices in both Australia and the US and a recent Magento Select Technology Partner, we love catching up with Magento clients and hearing about trends in the ecommerce industry at Magento events.

A common question in the Content Delivery World and one that we at section.io hear a lot is “How many PoPs does my website need?” To answer this question, first we will go into the background of CDN PoPs and why they were first utilized.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is an area filled with ever-changing recommendations from a wide range of sources. At it’s core, SEO is the practice of websites improving their rank in search engines by adhering to best practices including providing relevant content, using keywords and meta-tags, having good on-page user experience, and being linked to by other websites. Google’s PageRank is a famously mysterious algorithm which is constantly changing, making it difficult for websites to know how to appear on the coveted first page of search results.

How to Measure Website Performance: Now that we know what to measure we need to know how to actually go about it. This is actually a bit more complicated than you might expect, as there are several types of tools that are better in certain circumstances than others. Remember that every time a user interacts with your website, the conditions can be very different.

As more and more of our interactions with companies move from the real world to digital spaces, website performance has become a primary concern for business of all shapes and sizes. Website performance, however, could mean a lot of different things to different people depending on what type of good or service they are offering. Some businesses that handle sensitive information, like banks or government agencies, could be most concerned with security and reliability and consider that to be an element of website performance.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP is the communication protocol used by the World Wide Web that defines how messages are transmitted over the internet. HTTP/2 is the first major upgrade to HTTP/1 and is a major step forward in terms of website performance and speed of delivering content to browsers.

Magento 2 was released to merchants almost a year ago, and is a complete platform overhaul from Magento 1.x versions, rather than an update. There are several core differences between Magento 1.x and Magento 2 that are important for businesses and Magento developers and businesses to understand.

section.io has been helping Magento merchants make their sites faster, more scalable and more secure for several years. As studies have shown and section.io Magento customers have proven, improvement in web performance consistently leads to more products viewed, more cart conversion, and increased revenue. As the busy holiday season approaches, it’s more important now than at any other time to have a fast, secure website that can handle an increase in web traffic without slowing down or going offline.