The Usual Suspects: Five Configuration Fixes to Maximize Your Peak Sales
How to fix—and prevent—the five most common configuration issues for Adobe Commerce Sites
As we explained in this recent post, regular maintenance is the unsung hero of ecommerce site performance. And one often-overlooked aspect of site maintenance is periodically checking for configuration issues. Especially right after you’ve installed a patch, or implemented a new extension, or made changes to your site, configuration issues can evolve that go unnoticed.
While configuration issues are typically easy to fix, they can have a big impact on your site’s performance and security. Your site could crash during the holidays or a promotion that brings a lot of traffic to your storefront. Bad customer experiences could lead to abandoned carts and other lost sales opportunities. Or it could simply take longer for your team to perform routine maintenance tasks.
The good news is that the five most common configuration issues are easy to spot and address, especially when you know what you’re looking for. And promptly fixing them can prevent unplanned downtime and related lost sales. Read on to become an expert on the five common Adobe Commerce configuration issues, what they look like—and how to handle them fast.
Issue #1: Default CAPTCHAs
Impact: Higher cart abandonment.
Standard CAPTCHAs, including the default one in Adobe Commerce, require shoppers to fill out a form to prove they are a human shopper rather than a bot. When these forms appear on the checkout page, they add multiple clicks to the purchase process and make it more likely buyers will abandon their carts. Plus, when shoppers have to complete CAPTCHAs multiple times—such as when they login and access their account info—they may be less likely to return to your store at all.
To make your site easier to use while still guarding against spammers, we recommend enabling Google reCAPTCHA on your site. Google reCAPTCHA allows shoppers to be validated by clicking a single checkbox. This documentation explains how to enable it on your sites.
Issue #2: Cacheable variable set to “false”
Impact: Reduction in performance due to failure of your webstore pages to cache.
Adobe Commerce recommends caching pages to improve site performance, with the best improvements coming from utilizing the a CDN. But … what if none of the pages in your site are caching at all when they should be? If this happens, your storefront will experience a dramatic decrease in performance.
Fortunately, if pages aren’t caching, the problem is probably a simple configuration issue. If any block in a layout is designated as uncacheable, the entire page is uncacheable. What this means in practical terms is that if you add cacheable="false" into default.xml layout, your entire store will have no cache at all. Review this configuration via a test and validate all CMS, Catalog List, and Product View pages can be cached. Learn more about setting up caching in Adobe Commerce.
Issue #3: Unnecessary reindexing
Impact: Your webstore is running very slowly—and seems to be continually reindexing.
When your site is continually flushing and rebuilding its index, your web storefront can slow down—often by a lot. Moreover, continual reindexing can add locks on tables that also contribute to poor performance. If your site is constantly reindexing, it may be caused by some common admin functions, such as:
- Product attribute save
- Website/store/store view save
- Store configuration
One easy way to prevent performance issues caused by reindexing is to perform these actions outside of business hours. If this doesn’t address the issue, you may want to examine your third-party extensions for any that may also be causing full reindexing. This article can help you troubleshoot slow performance due to full reindexing; and this documentation can help you set up indexing so that it runs only when necessary.
Issue #4: End-of-service for minor releases
Impact: Mounting quality issues, security, or performance degradation due to a lack of patch implementation on your site.
Adobe’s development team continually works to ensure Adobe Commerce delivers the highest levels of security and performance for you and your customers. We provide regular patches to address any emerging vulnerabilities and let you access helpful new features without waiting for a new release. Generally speaking, keeping up with patches and using a supported version of Adobe Commerce is the best way to protect your site and take advantage of the latest functionality and performance enhancements.
If you’re unable to access the latest patches—and your site is experiencing performance issues—your version of Adobe Commerce may have passed its end-of-service deadline.
Fortunately, fixing this issue is easy. You just need to upgrade your commerce application to the next supported release. As a general rule, keeping up with new releases will ensure that you always have the latest features, functions, and security patches. Learn more about Adobe’s software lifecycle policy.
Issue #5: Out-of-date Magento Quality Patches
Impact: The latest patches and fixes for your version of Adobe Commerce aren’t appearing in your Magento Quality Patches (MQP) package.
MQP is a self-service tool that delivers individual patches and lets you easily apply, revert, and find information about all individual patches that are available for your version of Adobe Commerce. However, to install the latest patches, you must first update your MQP package. Otherwise, you could miss important functional or security updates.
Once again, addressing this issue is easy. Just be sure to update your MQP package before you view and install patches. Adobe also strongly recommends that you test new patches before you release them to your live production environment.
Find and fix problems faster
All of the issues described in this post cause noticeable “symptoms” that can prompt a technical investigation. And Adobe is working hard to make it easier to detect them before they affect customers and business users. If your site is running Adobe Commerce 2.4.1 or higher, you can see warnings about these issues and nearly 100 more in the Site-Wide Analysis Tool.
The Site-Wide Analysis Tool is easy-to-use, and we recommend reviewing the reports generated by the tool as a regular part of your ongoing site maintenance program.
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