Top 13 Magento Issues and Their Solutions

Issue 2: Cache management

Caching systems store content (HTML pages, database queries and product details) so that they do not need to be regenerated with every user request. If caching is managed poorly, you end up with too many requests: more database queries, higher server load, and slower page load time. Poor cache management can take you from 0-2 second page load (the gold standard) to as high as 4-6 seconds – that’s a recipe for lost customers (and revenue).

As sites increasingly generate dynamic and personalized content, brands must differentiate between public content (available to multiple customers, stored in a proxy cache such as the Magento file system) and private content (that content specific to an individual, stored in the browser). It is critical that you have a plan to cache both types of content.

Solution: Full page caching with Varnish

Full page caching will cache the entire output of the page (data, imagers, formats) so that future requests will return the cached page instead of trying to re-query and reload the page, increasing site performance. Magento supports full page caching out of the box, but Adobe recommends upgrading your cache management to use Varnish.

Storing content in the cache is great, but it is critical to regularly flush the cache when changes in products / categories / pages are made, when the site is upgraded, or when new extension integrations are added, ideally at a non-peak time. For larger stores, Varnish Enterprise offers more advanced capabilities including edge caching, demonstrating performance benchmarks such as <1ms cache response and a 10x reduction in backend load.

Issue 3: Hosting and server location

While this is not a consideration for Adobe Commerce on Cloud, Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce on-Premise users need to pay careful attention to choosing a host with a history of fast load times and high uptime, and choosing the right resources or server instances (compute, memory and network resources).

Budget hosting choices may result in poor performance, but the adage of ‘You get what you pay for’ is also true: the instance (number of servers) you choose has a direct impact on response time. Server location is critical for global organizations, as latency (the time it takes for data to travel from a server to a user) increases with geographic distance.

Solution: Scalable hosting and edge servers

Choose a global hosting solution (e.g. AWS or Google Cloud) that offer multiple data centers worldwide, supporting edge caching: the process of serving content closer to users to improve performance. Edge caching also provides critical redundancy, improving overall performance.

For scalable growth, choose a plan that offers server resources that are appropriate for your store size. For example, if you use AWS, this would include choosing instances in increments that begin at a “nano” offering and which scale to extra-large, with additional options to improve compute / memory / storage, which we detail in depth in our Magento performance optimization article.

Issue 4: Excessive promotions and price rules

Promotions in Adobe Commerce and Magento include the separate elements of discounts, coupons, cart price rules, and catalog price rules. While many B2C stores rely on discounts and coupon codes, in B2B we see more use of customer-specific pricing. The number and complexity of promotion rules can significantly slow down the website or parts of the website (homepage, product page, checkout), especially when you have a large number of promotions running concurrently.

The number of active promotions is particularly acute for cart and checkout performance, requiring Magento to evaluate each promotion or price rule at various points in the checkout process, which can result in increased server load and slower response times. For example, with 20+ promotions active, the cart page may take 4-8 seconds to load instead of the typical 1-3 seconds while checkout pages with multiple promotions may experience delays of 5-10 seconds, especially when combining promotions and calculating final totals.

Solution: Promotion optimization techniques

Instead of applying multiple promotions individually, consider combining promotions into fewer rules or structuring them more efficiently. This can help reduce the amount of rule checking required.

Alternatively, you can use Observers—elements of custom code that can influence the performance of an event in Magento. Instead of evaluating all promotions on every page load or cart update, you can write an Observer to alter when and how you evaluate rules.

• Asynchronous processing, allowing for background processing for discount calculations.

• Lazy loading, allowing for rules to be evaluated on demand (e.g. during the final review before order confirmation).