On September 12, Amasty CEO Sergej Derzap had an insightful conversation with our partners – Hyvä, Above the Fray, and RumVision – about accessibility, speed, and the impact of both on the revenue.
All webinar participants agreed that to succeed in the contemporary market, e-commerce businesses can’t ignore Google’s assessments of website accessibility and performance. Below, we share Amasty’s approach to meeting both key requirements and provide the video of the conversation in full.
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Amasty and Accessibility Compliance
Custom development to ensure accessibility can be a very lengthy and therefore expensive project. WCAG 2.1 compliance checks at the AA level (the advised standard) require verification of a whopping 50 criteria.
For an average extension, this means around 4 hours of work, assuming the QA has the necessary knowledge and experience in the domain. Testing a more feature-rich extension takes significantly longer. For instance, the Amasty team needed over 40 development and QA hours to make its Improved Layered Navigation Pro version fully accessible.
By choosing our WCAG-compliant extensions, Amasty clients save hours and hundreds of dollars. There are 16 WCAG 2.1 AA-compliant extensions in our catalog now and we expect to have 20+ by the end of Q3. Our goal is to make all Amasty modules accessibility-compliant, with a current priority on extensions like One-Step Checkout, RMA, and Reward Points.
Read More: Amasty, Hyvä, and Snowdog Partner to Enhance Accessibility
Amasty and Performance Testing
To ensure that Amasty extensions contribute to high speed scores in Core Web Vitals, we invest in quality performance tests of all our modules. We always test in dynamic settings since only they can provide genuinely insightful results. However, emulating various scenarios is not a quick or easy task.
Amasty uses Blackfire.io to monitor performance changes under varying request volumes, paying special attention to the following metrics:
- Script execution time – Our specialists analyze the time it takes to execute different parts of the code to identify and optimize bottlenecks.
- Memory usage – We monitor the amount of memory used to ensure there are no memory leaks or excessive resource consumption.
- Number of database queries – The team checks the number of database queries and their execution time to minimize latency and improve communication with the database.
- Number of function and method calls – Our experts analyze the number of function and method calls to optimize their use and avoid unnecessary ones.
- Page performance profiling – We perform a detailed performance analysis of each page to ensure that new features do not slow down the site.
Our team configures and runs such performance tests after each new upgrade release of all our extensions. Although that is a costly and time-consuming process, it helps us ensure consistently high performance of Amasty extensions and live up to our customers’ expectations.
Success Story: Performance Improvement for Darby Dental
Aware of page speed’s impact on business success, Darby Dental has always been very prudent in monitoring how Magento extensions affect their website’s performance. They use 6 Magento modules developed by Amasty and provide our team with helpful insights from real-case scenarios that help us to further refine our products.
Here’s a glimpse at how Amasty perfected the 2 extensions that had room for performance fine-tuning.
Free Gift – 2x Faster
For the Free Gift extension, the Amasty team rolled out 6 fine-tuning releases prompted by the client’s insights. Our optimization efforts successfully reduced the average load time for the Free Gift pop-up on the front end. Initially, the load time averaged around 3 seconds (ranging from 2.8 to 3.4 seconds). After optimization, the average load time was cut by more than 50%.
Improved Layered Navigation – 0.01 CLS
Based on the insights from this customer alone, Amasty released over 20 updates focused on boosting the speed of the Improved Layered Navigation extension. One of the recent updates tackled the long loading times for module configuration and attributes pages, particularly when many categories were involved. To address such scenarios, we even introduced a stand-alone patch that enables cache-type functionality.
Another ILN improvement our team has performed on the client’s request involved the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) score in Web Vitals. Previously, the side-menu subcategories expanded during page load and collapsed afterward, causing a noticeable content shift, while the ideal CLS should be less than 0.1. After our team’s efforts, we successfully reduced the CLS to an impressive 0.01, ensuring a smooth and stable page load with no content shifts.
Read More: How Amasty Boosted Store Locator’s Speed by 72%
Watch the Full Webinar for More Insights
Curious about more success stories and other insights from Amasty and partners? Watch the recording of the webinar in full and leave comments on the channel.
