Every store owner talks about conversions. You tweak headlines, test button colors, swap out product photos, etc. – all for the sake of turning more visitors into paying customers. But sometimes, the real conversion killers are hiding in the background or, as we should say in this context, in the backend. Minor issues in your store’s design and infrastructure can slow down product pages here and there by fractions of a second, or make getting through a checkout process a nightmare. And that will make your customers walk away just as effectively as prices that are a bit too high. 

Bloated Code, Thanks to a Plugin Overload

If your store is running on Magento or Drupal Commerce, you might have already realized that the flexibility and freedom they offer can sometimes be… restricting. Over time, many store owners tend to install plugins, modules, or extensions to solve specific problems without a second thought – a pop-up here, a chatbot for customer support there, etc.

The problem? Each one adds its own scripts, styles, and oftentimes also hidden dependencies. Over time, your site becomes slower and more difficult to manage, with potential compatibility issues looming in the background. And every delay in page load time negatively influences conversion rates. According to Google’s own research, a one-second delay can reduce conversions by up to 20%.

Best practices’ checklist:

• Maintain a documented list of all active plugins, modules, and libraries, including their purpose, version, and installation date.
• Audit your e-commerce platform regularly. Ask, “Does this directly improve sales or customer experience?” If not, remove it.
• Also, remove unmaintained or legacy plugins that haven’t been updated in the last 12-18 months.
• Avoid overlaps; don’t use three different tools to collect emails when one can do it effectively.
• If you use multipurpose plugins, verify if you really utilize all (or most) of their features. If not, consider replacing them with a few lightweight tools.
• Whenever possible, use native platform features before introducing third-party plugins.

Excessive External Requests

Another reason your store doesn’t run as smoothly as your customers expect might be poorly thought-out integrations with third-party services. The story goes just like in the previous case. Every third-party service your store’s connected with – analytics platforms, ad trackers, embedded widgets – adds another HTTP request to an external domain whenever a user’s browser wants to get onto your store. Each request requires DNS lookup, connection setup, and data transfer. When these requests are synchronous, they can delay critical rendering and block visible content.

So, a slow or unresponsive third-party script can undermine even the most optimized hosting environment. The customer doesn’t distinguish between “your” delay and a vendor’s delay – they just see a website that takes a bit too long to load.

Best practices’ checklist:

• Map all external calls with Chrome DevTools or WebPageTest to identify slow or blocking requests.
• Eliminate low-value scripts – remove trackers, widgets, or embedded content that don’t directly contribute to customer experience or essential analytics.
• If possible, load non-essential services (e.g., secondary analytics or chatbots) asynchronously to prevent render-blocking or defer them until after the first user interaction.
• Self-host static third-party resources such as fonts or small JS libraries to reduce DNS lookups and network latency.
• Try to consolidate overlapping integrations – e.g., unify analytics and heatmap tracking under one platform instead of running multiple in parallel.

Inefficient Checkout Processes

Let’s move on from the performance issues and talk about the single most fragile stage of the conversion path – the checkout process. Baymard Institute gathered data on shopping cart abandonment rates from multiple studies carried out in the past decade, and the average is… whooping 70.19%. The reason for at least some of these abandoned carts might be a customer’s sudden change of heart… but many of them are due to a poorly designed checkout process. Unclear progress indicators, too many steps to take, redundant form fields, or slow payment validation; they can all push your customers away.

Best practices’ checklist:

• Always use a visible progress bar to reassure customers of how many steps remain.
• Shorten the checkout process to as few steps as possible, ideally a single page or two logical stages.
• Enable address auto-completion and pre-validate promo codes in real time; your customers will thank you for that.
• Offer multiple payment gateways to give customers a choice, but also as a backup, if one of the payment methods is unavailable.
• Save incomplete checkouts, so your customers can return later without re-entering details.

Mobile Optimization That Leaves Much to Be Desired

How much of your store’s traffic is driven by mobile users? According to DynamicYield’s data, the average traffic share for e-commerce sites on the U.S. market is 71%. That’s a great majority, yet many stores still treat their mobile versions as a scaled-down desktop experience. As a result, users still come across poorly adapted menus, uncompressed images, or CTAs that are simply impossible to reach with one hand. That, again, increases bounce rates and reduces conversions, especially among first-time visitors for whom it’s their first (and not very flattering) impression of your store.

Best practices’ checklist:

• Start thinking about your store’s design like it’s a mobile-first app. Design mobile navigation independently rather than shrinking the desktop menu.
• Wherever possible, use simplified navigation with collapsible menus and prioritized categories.
• Test all touch targets for size and reachability with common one-handed grip patterns. For instance, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines suggest that touch targets should be at least 44 x 44 pixels and provide at least 8 pixels of spacing between interactive elements to prevent mis-taps; that’s still a very common issue.
• Prioritize above-the-fold content so key product details and CTAs are visible without scrolling. And, for a good measure, avoid intrusive pop-ups; use inline banners or slide-ins instead.
• Optimize image delivery using responsive image techniques (srcset!) and mobile-specific compression.

Some of the Conversion Killers Are Hidden Much Deeper

Some of the issues mentioned before can be solved quite easily, without a complete overhaul of your store’s core programming. Others would require a dedicated development team to step in. That’s where experts from Smartbees might help. If you want to learn more about how your store can bounce from disappointing conversion rates and start providing customers with the experiences they expect, check out Smartbees’ case studies and consider a complex technical audit.