Roundup: Meet Magento UK (MMUK) 2024

Here is a summary of just some of the great topics and information snippets available from Meet Magento UK (MMUK) 2024

Accessibility is a process. Make it an easy part of your team’s daily routine (Kuba Zwolinski, Snowdog)

• Accessibility is the responsibility of everyone in the business from design to development to QA. Make sure everyone is up to speed and knows their responsibility. Provide training if necessary.
• Hyvä has a lot of accessibility features built into its templates.
• It’s a daily process – consider accessibility every day, for every task.
• Snowdog has created a FREE web accessibility testing and report generation tool (and it’s not just for Magento!)

State of Web Performance in 2024 (Karlijn Löwik, RUMVision)

• Lighthouse scores are pretty but not all that useful for long-term improvements.
  • The scores are based on a simulated page load and simulated data.
  • They can help you see if the changes you just made have taken effect, but you don’t know if these changes will work for your users on old tech with a poor connection compared to your high-spec machine.
• Core Web Vitals give you a better insight into the metrics Google uses for ranking, as these scores are based on real user experience.
  • Core Web Vitals are powered by actual field data gathered from the real experience of your website users over the past 28 days.
  • These scores are more useful than Lighthouse, but there is a 28-day delay in seeing the effects of your improvements.
• Use something like RUMVision which employs Real User Monitoring (RUM) to see the data in real-time, and help keep your website on the cutting edge of performance.

7 Ways to be an Ally for Women in Tech (Ksenia Zvereva, Mollie)

• Promote the women in your company (in both senses of the word!)
• Make space for women:
  • Call on women in meetings to amplify their voice.
  • Make sanitary items and painkillers free and easily available to create a welcoming environment.
• Mothers tend to have a lot of pressure to keep lots of plates spinning – support them with flexibility in hours and WFH. (Supporting Fathers to do the same will also help Mothers 🙂 )
• Job descriptions for tech companies can be off-putting, but there are ways to write job descriptions that appeal to more women:
  • Reduce requirements (on average, women want to meet 70-90% of the job description to apply. For men, it is more like 30%).
  • Research tone of voice to attract women.
• Survey, gather feedback, and listen to the women in your organisation. And then most importantly… implement the ideas you gather.

How to use AI right now (panel)

• Opt out of data collection where possible. Ask yourself: where is your data going? Opting out can help protect:
  • Personal details.
  • Business secrets.
  • Your competitive edge.
• If you work with AI, reduce the barrier to entry. Think of Apple adding the ability to type to Siri rather than speak. Not only does this allow people a choice in how they engage, it’s also great for accessibility!
• Use AI to speed up time-consuming parts of the business. E.g.
  • Use chatbots like Nibble AI to negotiate individual discounts without brand damage.
  • Generate product recommendations based on previous customer interactions.

Simplicity: the Secret to Building Better Magento Storefronts (John Hughes, Hyvä)

• Hyvä is what the Magento community wishes came as standard!
• With a Hyvä theme, the number of javascript and CSS files are dramatically reduced, allowing Magento stores to use a more modern tech stack (TailwindCSS, Alpine.js) and giving a boost to speed and performance.
• Hyvä now supports x-defer and speculative page loading.

• Start using speculative loading to pre-load pages based on user intent (e.g. hover) for instant page loads
  • Available on 73%+ of browsers.
  • Speculation Rules are available in the latest Hyvä version, but they can implemented on any website.

10 Pitfalls with Test Driven Development for Magento teams (Max Pronko, Pronko Consulting)

• Unit tests can be used to protect essential classes from being overwritten.
• API tests, and integration tests also fall under the umbrella of Test Driven Development (TDD).
• The basic process is as follows:
  • Hit an error → write a small test that fails → write a line of code → amend the code until the test passes.

• Repeat the process until the error is fixed and you have a test with 100% coverage
  

• When it comes to TDD in Magento 2, PHPUnit and PHPUnit.xml are your bread and butter.
• Get started today:
  • Install PHPUnit and get testing:
    composer require phpunit/phpunit --dev
php -f vendor/bin/phpunit --generate-configuration
mkdir -p Test/Unit/
  • The first test can simply verify the class exists:
    class PopupServiceTest extends TestCase {
        public function textExecute(): void {
    $object = new PopupService();
        }
    }
    

• • Run the tests:
    vendor/bin/phpunit -c phpunit.xml 
• Use no more than 3 object managers in Magento 2 unit tests.
• Learn more about Test Driven Development from Max Pronko. 

Secrets of a Great CTO (panel)

• Focus should be strategic more than development, but it’s important not to lose touch with tech.
• Data is gold dust; use it to your advantage.
• The big question in development: build it or buy it? Be mindful of your natural preference. Ask yourself, is your first instinct to build or buy a solution?
  • Be aware of and challenge your bias, whether you’re a builder, a buyer or an assembler!
  • Think about all the pros & cons of the available options.
    • Building it gets you exactly what you want without the bloat.
    • Buying gets the product to market quicker.
    • Building can allow you to grow the idea into a standalone product in future.
    • Buying part of the solution can help you build the full solution faster.

Misadventures in Core Web Vitals (Matt Medlyn from Graham & Green)

• Matt says: MAKE IT SLOW!!
• Your customers are probably on an old device with a rubbish connection.
• Throttle the page using dev tools to understand what they are seeing, and therefore why your core web vitals are not green.
  • If you have never done this before… brace yourself.
• This tip is particularly useful for fixing cumulative layout shift.
• If you don’t need it, get rid of it!
  • If there is an element on your page that is particularly affecting page speed, for example, a background image, there are many things you can try to optimise the element. But first ask yourself.. do you actually need the image?

• Don’t rely on system-set font fallbacks… Set your own that are as close as possible to your chosen font.
• If your chosen font is very different to the system fallback, you may see layout shifts as the same text can span a different number of lines between the system font and the chosen font.

Enhancing Purchasing Experience for our B2B Customers (Martins Saukums, The Cary Company)

• Don’t blindly follow trends; find and provide the best options for your customers.
• The best way to make your website more profitable is to make it work how your customer base needs it to.
• Listen to the customer service team; find out the most common requests from customers.
• Survey and gather feedback.

Event-Driven Architecture with Magento (Andreas von Studnitz, integer_net)

• Meet Mage-OS Asynchronous Events: Mage-os’ answer to Adobe I/O, the Adobe Commerce Event driven Architecture solution.
• This opensource module is fully integrated to Mage-OS and is compatible with Magento 2.
• If you’ve not heard of it before, Mage-os is a fork of Magento Open Source, which is fully community-managed.
• Event-driven architecture allows for quicker responsivity between the Magento database and the frontend. Magento’s standard saving process can leave modern audiences drumming their fingers, and it is simply too slow to achieve some ecommerce functionalities.
  • E.g. if a customer can personalise a product, the system would need to save lots of small changes. Having to wait for a success response after each tiny change… No thank you.
• This asynchronous events extension is used in the Magento admin. It lists the number of attempts, errors etc
• Read a full and much more in-depth summary of Event Driven Architecture for Magento 2 here.

Meet Magento UK (MMUK) 2024 was a treasure trove of insights and tools, and I hope you find my notes as helpful as I do! From making accessibility part of our daily routines to leveraging real user data for performance, to championing diversity and simplifying Magento storefronts, there’s plenty to implement right away.

I hope you will join me in embracing AI, fostering inclusivity, and diving into Test Driven Development, to build smarter, more inclusive eCommerce solutions. Let’s put these insights into action and make our projects fly!

See you at the next MMUK!