Peakhour.IO - Magento

Visa's Security Roadmap 2025-2028

2025-01-21T00:00:00+11:00

Visa's Security Roadmap 2025-2028 for Australia is not just a payments strategy document. It is a signal about where fraud, application security, authentication, and compliance work are converging for merchants, acquirers, issuers, gateways, and service providers.

The timing matters. Visa's roadmap cites Australian card fraud rising 32% to A$762 million in 2023, with unauthorised card-not-present fraud increasing 33% to A$688 million. Scam losses reached A$2.7 billion in 2023, and reported data breaches increased 19% in the second half of 2023 compared with the first half. The pressure is not coming from one direction. Payment teams are dealing with automation abuse, social engineering, compromised credentials, weak merchant onboarding, third-party exposure, and new payment experiences at the same time.

Visa groups its roadmap into six focus areas: preventing enumeration attacks, continued investment in secure technologies, data-driven risk, resilience against fraud and scams in the era of AI, stronger cyber security posture, and secure digital payment experiences. For Australian businesses, the more useful way to read it is as a set of operational themes.

Automation Abuse Has Become a Payment Control Issue

Enumeration attacks sit first in the roadmap for a reason. Visa defines enumeration and account testing as automation used to test and guess payment credentials that can later be used in fraudulent transactions. The attacks often appear as high-speed card testing against online merchants, with low-value attempts used to validate PAN, expiry, or CVV2 combinations.

Visa reports a 40% increase in enumeration attacks in the first six months of 2023 compared with the previous period, and more than US$1.1 billion in global fraud losses from enumeration attacks over the year to 30 September 2023. The updated Visa Acquirer Monitoring Program (VAMP), effective 1 April 2025, adds enumeration criteria alongside broader fraud and dispute monitoring.

The implication is practical: merchants and acquirers need route-level evidence, anomaly monitoring, velocity controls, and a way to identify distributed automation before it becomes payment fraud. IP-only controls are weak when attacks use residential proxies, first-seen devices, and slow distributed attempts. Peakhour's bot management, residential proxy detection, advanced rate limiting, and edge logging can help support that evidence path, but the business still needs payment-flow ownership and acquirer alignment.

Authentication and Tokenisation Are Moving Together

Visa's secure technology theme is not simply "add more authentication." The roadmap ties tokenisation, EMV 3DS, biometric or in-app authentication, passkeys, and Click to Pay into the same customer and fraud problem: protect credentials while reducing unnecessary friction.

Tokenisation reduces the value of exposed card data by replacing a card number with a token. Visa notes that the Visa Token Service has passed one billion tokens in Asia Pacific and that merchants adopting VTS for digital payments saw payment fraud rates reduced by more than half in the cited Asia Pacific analysis. But the roadmap also flags token provisioning fraud, where bad actors illegitimately provision tokens and then monetise them quickly.

That is why authentication quality matters. Visa says issuers are being mandated to move away from SMS OTP as the sole authentication factor by 2026, toward methods such as biometric, in-app, app-to-app, or passkey-based authentication. For merchants, updated Visa Secure minimum data requirements push more complete authentication data into the decision process.

For application teams, the lesson is that checkout security is not a single login prompt. It includes account creation, saved-card use, card add, token provisioning, checkout, refund, and support paths. A risk-based challenge should appear where the action justifies it, not everywhere by default.

Risk Decisions Need Better Data, Not Just More Data

The roadmap's data-driven risk theme is about using available payment and authentication data to reduce fraud and false positives. Visa points to EMV 3DS data elements, Visa Secure requirements, risk-based authentication, and issuer decisioning as examples of how better data quality can change outcomes.

More data is not automatically better. It has to be accurate, relevant, protected, and available at the moment of decision. A fraud team may need account history, device consistency, proxy likelihood, card-attempt cadence, transaction context, and previous response outcomes. A compliance team may need to know why that data is collected, where it is retained, and who can query it.

This is where contextual security becomes useful. Peakhour's Contextual Security approach combines request, route, account, network, device, and behaviour signals so teams can allow, challenge, rate limit, block, or log based on risk. The control is strongest when the decision record stays attached to the event: signal set, policy version, action, and outcome.

AI Raises Scam and Fraud Pressure, But It Is Also Part of Detection

Visa frames AI in both directions. Generative AI lowers the barrier for phishing, social engineering, deepfakes, and personalised scam content. At the same time, Visa points to its long history using AI and machine learning in payment fraud detection, including around 150 AI and machine learning models in production.

For businesses outside the payment network, the message is not "buy AI." It is to prepare for more scalable deception and faster abuse cycles. Fraud controls need to watch for account creation abuse, credential stuffing, payment testing, suspicious onboarding, transaction anomalies, and customer manipulation signals. Human review still matters because authorised scams can look different from unauthorised account compromise.

Peakhour's role is strongest around the request and account edge: identifying automation, proxy-backed traffic, route abuse, credential risk, and abnormal behaviour before fraud reaches sensitive application paths. Those signals can feed fraud review and incident response, but they should be used with privacy, false-positive, and customer-impact controls.

Cyber Posture Is Now Part of Payment Ecosystem Resilience

Visa's fifth theme connects payment fraud to cyber security posture. PCI DSS remains mandatory for entities storing, processing, or transmitting Visa cardholder data. Visa also highlights third-party agent (TPA) registration, its Account Information Security program, third-party service provider risk, breach trends, and preparation for broader AES support by 2030.

For Australian businesses, this is a reminder that payment risk is not limited to the payment processor. A breach of a CMS account, a third-party script, a weak checkout plugin, a vulnerable API, a compromised support tool, or an unmanaged service provider can affect the payment environment. PCI scope and third-party oversight need to include the systems that can change or observe checkout, not only systems that store card numbers.

Peakhour can help with application-layer controls around WAF, API protection, bot management, rate limiting, DDoS mitigation, and log forwarding. Those controls can support evidence for payment security and cyber posture. They do not replace PCI DSS validation, TPA obligations, acquirer requirements, or legal review.

New Payment Experiences Need Security Built Into the Flow

Visa's final theme covers digital payment experiences such as Click to Pay, passkeys, Flex Credential, and Tap to Everything. These changes are about reducing manual card entry, password dependence, and fragmented checkout experiences while preserving cardholder verification and transaction security.

The security work for merchants is to keep pace with those flows. New payment methods bring new integration paths, data elements, redirects, APIs, support workflows, and customer education needs. The right question is not only "does the new payment method work?" It is "which systems can affect it, what data is passed, how is the customer verified, what fraud signals are available, and what evidence remains after a dispute or incident?"

What Businesses Should Do Next

Read the roadmap as an operating agenda. Map payment and account routes. Identify where automation can test credentials or cards. Review SMS OTP dependence. Check whether tokenisation and 3DS data are being used well. Validate which vendors affect checkout and payment security. Confirm that logs can support fraud review without capturing sensitive card data. Tune rate limits and bot controls by route, not only by IP.

The next few years of payment security will reward teams that can make proportionate, evidence-backed decisions. That is the thread running through Visa's roadmap and through Peakhour's edge security work: see the request in context, choose the right action, and keep enough evidence for fraud, security, and compliance teams to explain what happened.

Account Protection and User Experience in Web Applications

2024-07-17T10:00:00+10:00

Web applications face a wide range of security threats, but customer accounts are often the target. Our recent survey of Australian businesses showed a need for stronger account protection measures. Those controls can add friction for users if they are applied too broadly. This article looks at ways to balance security with user experience in web applications.

The Challenge: Compromised Credentials

Our survey found that 21% of organisations cited reputation loss as their main cybersecurity challenge. That result points back to a practical security problem: compromised credentials.

Causes of compromised logins include:

Phishing attacks
Password reuse across multiple sites
Data breaches exposing user credentials
Credential stuffing attacks
Keylogging malware

These risks make password-only authentication a weak control for customer account protection.

Moving Beyond Traditional Multi-Factor Authentication

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) adds a useful security layer, but it can also add friction. Our survey found that only 40% of organisations implement bot protection, which leaves a clear gap around automated attacks.

While 77% of surveyed businesses use MFA, that figure can hide other weaknesses. MFA alone doesn't protect accounts from every attack path.

Learn more about the limitations of traditional MFA

Contextual Security: A User-Focused Approach

Contextual security helps reduce that tradeoff between protection and user experience. It assesses the risk of each login attempt using factors including:

Location of the login attempt
Time of day
Device used
User behaviour patterns
IP address reputation
Network characteristics

By analysing these contextual factors, web applications can apply adaptive authentication without asking every user to complete an extra step every time.

Figure 1: Key factors considered in contextual security

Implementing Contextual Security in Web Applications

To improve account protection without adding unnecessary friction, consider these controls:

Real-time monitoring: Track user activity and detect anomalies.
Adaptive authentication: Adjust security requirements based on the risk level of each login attempt.
Behavioural analysis: Use machine learning to understand user behaviour and flag suspicious activity.
Transparent security measures: Apply checks that don't require additional user actions for low-risk scenarios.
Risk-based access controls: Apply stricter security measures for high-risk actions or sensitive data access.
Bot protection: Detect and mitigate automated attacks.
API security: Protect APIs from abuse and unauthorised access.
Residential proxy detection: Identify and mitigate threats from residential proxy networks.

For web applications, the goal is targeted control rather than blanket friction.

The Role of User Education

User education still has a place in a security strategy. Training and awareness programs can help users understand:

The importance of strong, unique passwords
How to identify phishing attempts
The risks of password reuse across multiple sites
The importance of keeping software and devices updated
How to recognise and report suspicious activities

User education works best when it supports technical controls rather than carrying the whole burden.

Addressing Mobile Application Security

Our survey indicates a potential gap in mobile security strategies. As mobile apps take on operations like banking and e-commerce, they become part of the application attack surface.

Only 30% of respondents implement Web Application and API Protection (WAAP), indicating many businesses may not be ready to protect their mobile assets. That gap leaves mobile applications exposed to attacks, including API abuse and data exfiltration.

The Threat of Residential Proxies

Our survey found that only 15% of organisations use residential proxy detection. That low adoption rate leaves a weakness in many businesses' security postures.

Residential proxies can threaten account security by:

Bypassing traditional IP-based rate limiting
Evading geolocation-based restrictions
Facilitating large-scale credential stuffing attacks
Enabling undetected data scraping

Businesses should consider security providers that can detect and mitigate residential proxy threats.

Learn more about residential proxy detection

Finding the Balance

Balancing account protection and user experience in web applications requires more than a single control. By implementing contextual security measures, organisations can:

Improve security without unnecessary impact on user experience
Adapt to threats in real-time
Reduce the risk of compromised credentials and account takeovers
Protect against threats like residential proxies and mobile application vulnerabilities

As threats change, account protection needs to change with them. Contextual security gives organisations a practical way to protect users and their reputation.

The Cost of Credential Stuffing

2024-07-17T00:00:00+10:00

In recent months, Australian businesses have faced a wave of credential stuffing attacks. These attacks do not require the affected website itself to be breached. They target customer accounts, leading to fraudulent transactions. The damage is practical as well as reputational: disputed purchases, refunds, locked accounts, and customers asking how someone else was able to use their account.

What is Credential Stuffing?

Credential stuffing occurs when attackers use login details obtained from a data breach to access accounts on other sites. Criminals test millions of credentials against a target website to identify working combinations. This attack affects users who reuse passwords across multiple services [1].

The Scale of the Problem

Tens of thousands of Australian online accounts are reported to have been accessed since late November 2023 [2]. The attacks affected major retailers and service providers, including:

The Iconic
Guzman y Gomez
Dan Murphy's
Event Cinemas
Stan

The Impact

While reusing passwords between sites has long been considered poor security practice, users still do it. Blaming the customer, as 23andMe did in its response to an attack, is not a serious account protection strategy. Over 70% of Americans believe that websites have a responsibility to prevent account takeovers via stuffing attacks. Not doing so can negatively impact a business in several ways.

Financial Impact

The cost can fall on either the affected business or the affected customer. Fraudsters made significant purchases using compromised accounts. One scammer claimed to have spent over $800 on high-end alcohol at Dan Murphy's [2]. Others bought iPhones and clothing. Either the customer will be out of pocket, or the business when the customer issues a chargeback on the purchase.

Reputation Damage

The attacks leave businesses dealing with customer complaints, refunds, and visible questions about account security. The Iconic pledged to refund affected customers [1]. Dan Murphy's confirmed that a "small number of user accounts were subject to fraudulent transactions" [3].

Customer Trust

These incidents erode customer trust. Users expect businesses to make account abuse difficult, even when the original password leak happened somewhere else. When accounts are taken over, customers question the security practices of the affected companies.

Business Response

Companies responded by:

Locking compromised accounts
Issuing refunds
Encouraging customers to change passwords
Implementing stronger security measures

Dan Murphy's advised customers to "practise good password hygiene, using a strong password and changing it periodically" [3].

Prevention Strategies

To protect against credential stuffing, businesses should:

Implement multi-factor authentication
Educate customers about password security
Monitor login behaviour on their website
Implement, and regularly update, security measures, including bot management and advanced rate limiting.

Credential stuffing is not just a password reuse problem. It is an account protection problem, and businesses that sell online need controls that make stolen credentials harder to turn into purchases.

Sources:

[^1^] ABC News: "The Iconic was hit by criminals taking money by 'credential stuffing'. How can you stay safe?" [^2^] Cyber Daily: "Guzman y Gomez, Dan Murphy's customers affected in credential stuffing campaign" [^3^] The Sydney Morning Herald: "Thousands of Australians hacked in 'credential stuffing' credit card scam"

Enterprise-Level Caching for All

2023-11-02T13:00:00+11:00

We've released our Magento 2 plugin for e-commerce stores using Magento. It brings Peakhour's caching features into Magento, including capabilities that other providers often reserve for enterprise plans. With Peakhour, 'Enterprise for Everyone' means making those features available to all customers, regardless of plan.

Why Cache Tags Matter

Cache tags solve a practical website management problem: keeping your cache current when content changes. In Magento 2, a single change, such as updating a product's price, can affect multiple pages. Cache tags ensure that only the relevant cached content is updated, maintaining cache efficiency and reducing server load. That matters for website speed and user experience, which directly affect sales and SEO rankings.

Enterprise for Everyone

While other providers offer cache tags only in expensive enterprise plans, Peakhour makes this feature available to everyone. Our infrastructure and caching algorithms make that possible. We also offer other enterprise-level features, including DDoS protection, real-time analytics, and custom caching rules, so 'Enterprise for Everyone' is reflected in the product rather than just the plan names.

Peakhour vs. Magento and Varnish Caching

Our plugin goes beyond Magento's built-in caching and Varnish cache in several ways:

Custom Cache Tags: Unlike Magento's built-in cache, we offer custom cache tags for more granular cache control.
Advanced Algorithms: Our caching algorithms go beyond Varnish, helping improve cache hit rates and lower server load.
Additional Features: With Peakhour, caching sits alongside real-time analytics, DDoS protection, and custom caching rules, features often missing in standard Magento or Varnish setups.

Expected Performance Improvements

By using Peakhour's Magento 2 plugin, you can expect performance improvements:

Faster Page Loads: Our caching can reduce page load times by up to 50%, giving users a smoother experience.
Reduced Server Load: Efficient caching means fewer requests to your origin server, reducing server load by as much as 70%.
Improved SEO: Faster websites are favoured by search engines, which can improve SEO rankings.
Higher Conversion Rates: A faster website gives users a better experience, which can lead to higher conversion rates and increased sales.

Installation Options

You can install the Magento 2 plugin through Magento Connect, Composer, or a ZIP file. For more detail, see our plugin page.

Useful tips to accelerate your Magento store

2023-11-01T13:00:00+11:00

Out of the box, Magento is not the fastest ecommerce platform. Magento 2 is built with Full Page Cache in mind, so repeat page requests do not always have to hit the application. A slow Magento store can frustrate customers, increase bounce rates, and cost sales. There are several practical ways to accelerate your Magento store and improve the user experience. These are good places to start.

Caching is King

Caching is usually the biggest performance lever for a Magento store. By storing pre-generated versions of pages, you reduce server response times and avoid asking Magento to rebuild the same page for every request.

Full Page Caching (FPC): Magento includes built-in FPC, but it can be extended. Varnish is a common choice for this role. Magento 2 has native support for Varnish, which acts as a web application accelerator.
Redis: Use Redis for session and cache storage. It is an in-memory data structure store that can speed up backend operations by reducing database load.
Edge Caching: Use Peakhour Edge to cache your dynamic pages close to users. This serves content from a nearby delivery path and reduces latency. Peakhour's Magento 1 and Magento 2 plugins make this straightforward to set up.

Optimise Your Images

Images often make up the bulk of a page's weight. Optimising them is one of the simplest ways to improve load times.

Compression: Use image compression tools to reduce file sizes without a noticeable loss in quality.
Next-Gen Formats: Serve images in modern formats like WebP or AVIF, which offer better compression. A CDN can often handle this conversion automatically.
Lazy Loading: Implement lazy loading for images that are "below the fold" (not immediately visible). This means they only load when they are about to enter the user's viewport.

Minify and Merge CSS/JavaScript

Magento has built-in features for merging and minifying CSS and JavaScript files.

Minification: Removes unnecessary characters (like whitespace and comments) from code to reduce file size.
Merging: Combines multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file to reduce the number of HTTP requests.

Note: Always test thoroughly after enabling merging, as it can sometimes cause issues with certain themes or extensions.

Keep Your Environment Updated

The environment your Magento store runs in has a direct effect on performance.

Latest PHP Version: Use the latest stable version of PHP supported by your Magento version. Each new release brings performance and security improvements.
Server Resources: Ensure your server has adequate RAM and CPU power to handle your traffic, especially during peak times.
Web Server: Use a high-performance web server like Nginx, which is known for its speed and efficiency.

Use Edge Caching and Delivery

An edge delivery layer is a practical requirement for many ecommerce stores. It caches your static assets (images, CSS, JavaScript) close to users.

Reduced Latency: Users receive content from the server geographically closest to them, which speeds up load times.
Reduced Origin Load: By serving cached content, an edge cache reduces the number of requests that hit your origin server, improving its performance and stability.
Enhanced Security: Peakhour also offers security features like a Web Application Firewall (WAF) and DDoS protection.

Database Optimisation

A slow database can slow the whole store.

Clean Logs: Regularly clean out Magento's log tables (e.g., log_customer, log_visitor). These can grow very large and slow down database queries.
Enable Flat Catalog: For Magento 1 and older versions of Magento 2, enabling the Flat Catalog for products and categories can improve performance by reducing the complexity of database queries.
Re-index Regularly: Keep your Magento indexes up to date. A cron job should be set up to handle this automatically.

Audit Third-Party Extensions

Poorly coded or unnecessary third-party extensions are a common cause of Magento performance issues.

Review Extensions: Audit your installed extensions regularly. If you're not using one, disable or uninstall it.
Use a Profiler: Use Magento's built-in profiler or a tool like New Relic to identify slow-running code, which can often be traced back to a specific extension.

These changes will not fix every Magento performance problem, but they cover the areas that usually matter first: cache behaviour, asset weight, the hosting environment, database maintenance, and extension overhead.

Navigating CDN Consolidation

2023-11-01T00:00:00+11:00

The CDN industry is moving quickly, with major providers such as Akamai and Cloudflare consolidating their positions. For businesses caught in that movement, changing CDN providers is rarely a simple swap. Your CDN sits in front of your website or application, so migration decisions touch performance, security, routing, caching, and operational risk.

Market Shifts in the CDN Industry

The CDN market is being reshaped by large providers and newer entrants. Akamai's acquisition of Linode is one example, expanding its cloud services and strengthening its position beyond CDN. Cloudflare is moving in a similar direction, adding cloud-based services around its CDN platform.

Akamai's Strategic Moves

Akamai has recently bought customer contracts from both Lumen and StackPath. This is likely to lift its 2024 revenue by tens of millions of dollars. The transferred customers will also benefit from Akamai’s wider cloud and security services.

Azure CDN Standard from Akamai, StackPath CDN, and Lumen CDN are all going offline soon. Clients have received only 2-3 months' notice to migrate, which is a tight window for a service that usually has routing, security, caching, and origin dependencies. Vendors should avoid putting customers in this position. A multi-CDN strategy can reduce that exposure.

What Happened to Section.io?

Section.io, once a CDN, shifted to edge computing before being sold to Webscale. That leaves approximately 300 Australian websites looking for new service providers. If you are one of them, now is the time to act.

These moves make the decision to switch or stay with a CDN provider more complex, especially for smaller businesses that need flexible and reliable local alternatives such as Peakhour. Switching your CDN is not as straightforward as changing a DNS record. Your CDN acts as the gateway to your website or application, so a move can involve reconfiguring a large part of the delivery stack.

Why Peakhour Is the Right Choice

Peakhour is a local, reliable alternative in an industry changing quickly. We offer the flexibility needed for customisation and a full suite of services.

If you are considering a CDN switch, treat it as a technical migration rather than a procurement task. Peakhour can help make that transition smoother.

Peakhour's Top 10 Things to Consider When Changing Providers

Switching CDNs? Work through these ten factors before you move:

Caching Rules: Use the migration to review and optimise your caching settings.
POP Distribution: Understand how the new CDN's points of presence may affect your traffic.
Security Gaps: Evaluate how the new CDN's security measures compare to your current provider.
Access Lists: Make sure IP whitelists and blacklists are carried over cleanly.
Origin Security: Update IP addresses to ensure your origin server recognises the new CDN.
SSL/TLS Certificates: Confirm the new CDN supports your existing SSL/TLS settings and can carry over the certificates you need.
API Compatibility: Ensure the new CDN offers APIs that match or exceed your current usage.
Analytics and Monitoring: Assess if the new CDN's analytics tools meet your needs.
Rate Limiting: Review the new CDN's rate limiting options, especially if your site experiences traffic bursts.
Costs: Account for migration work, potential downtime, and any hidden fees.

Additional Considerations for a Seamless Transition

Beyond the top ten, also consider:

Bot Protection: Evaluate how the new CDN manages automated traffic.
User Agent Validation: Make sure the new CDN effectively screens search engine bots.
IP Reputation Lists: Know how your new CDN updates and uses IP reputation lists.
API Protection: Confirm that the new CDN provides strong API security controls.
Dynamic Page Caching: Check how the new CDN handles caching for dynamic content.
Query String Handling: Understand how your new CDN treats query strings, as this can affect cache performance after migration.

Special Concerns for E-commerce Sites

For e-commerce, also think about:

Site Integrations: Does the new CDN support plugins for your platform, such as Magento?
Custom WAF Rules and Exceptions: Ensure these can be moved to the new CDN.
Image Optimisation: Update Image APIs if your CDN handles image transformations.

Advanced Configurations

Advanced setups need closer review:

Origin Mounting: Confirm your multiple origins will work as needed with the new CDN.
Request Routing: Make sure you can replicate your existing routing configurations with the new provider.
Edge Redirects: Ensure the new CDN can handle any redirects you’ve configured at the edge.

Headless Commerce Security

2023-06-28T00:00:00+10:00

At Peakhour, we spend a lot of time looking at e-commerce architecture trends. Single Page Applications (SPAs) and headless commerce keep coming up, with tools such as Nuxt.js, Strapi, Hydrogen, and Gatsby leading many builds. These tools can make frontend work faster and more flexible, but they also put more e-commerce data behind APIs that scrapers can target.

Single Page Applications (SPAs) and headless e-commerce have changed how many retailers build their storefronts. Frontend development tools like Nuxt.js and headless CMSs like Strapi are now common parts of that stack.

The trade-off is exposure. Product information is often available as JSON data, which makes it easier for scrapers to collect at scale. That raises a practical question: how do you secure data while still making it available through APIs?

Strategies for Data Protection

Data protection matters, but it is not a single control. These are the usual layers:

Rate Limiting: Controls the number of client requests to your API within a set time frame.
Bot Detection: Distinguishes between humans and bots based on behavioural patterns.
Page Load Authentication: Secures the page load through bot detection and authenticates subsequent API calls.
IP Threat Intelligence: Blocks suspicious IP addresses from accessing your API.
GeoIP Filtering: Regulates requests based on geographical origin.

As bots change, those controls need to change as well.

Facing the Challenge of Headless Scraping

Headless scraping uses browsers without a user interface to imitate normal browsing. It is difficult to detect, but network fingerprinting can help.

Network fingerprinting examines network features like Transport Layer Security (TLS) settings and HTTP/2 (H2) parameters. By analysing these, companies can detect and block bots, adding another security layer.

Client-side Security in SPAs

In SPAs, where much of the processing happens in the user's browser, the security concerns shift:

Data Exposure: Protecting sensitive data from leakage or manipulation is critical.
Injection Attacks: SPAs must guard against attacks like Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).
Authentication and Session Management: Properly handled, these prevent unauthorised access.
Insecure Direct Object References (IDORs): Proper authorisation stops attackers from accessing others' data.

Risks in JavaScript Packages

SPAs usually depend on JavaScript libraries and packages. They are useful, but they also add supply chain risk. Using only essential packages, keeping them updated, and sourcing them from trusted providers reduces that risk. Supply chain audit tools can help automate the work:

Security audits need to be frequent because vulnerabilities can appear quickly. Tools like npm's npm audit or GitHub's Dependabot, along with regular penetration testing, can help uncover potential weaknesses.

Final Thoughts

The move toward SPAs and headless commerce is a trade-off between development flexibility and security exposure. These architectures can improve user experience and speed up delivery, but they also introduce new security issues.

Client-side security in SPAs needs deliberate attention. Data exposure, injection attacks, and insecure direct object references all need to be managed, and the convenience of JavaScript libraries brings its own vulnerabilities.

Peakhour addresses these problems with rate limiting that manages request traffic and helps prevent attacks without harming customer experience. Our Web Application Firewall (WAF) examines all payload data, adding another layer of protection.

Frequent security audits still matter. They help e-commerce managers keep SPAs and headless commerce operations secure without giving up the efficiency these architectures can provide.

Maximising Website Speed

2023-06-07T12:31:00+10:00

As businesses prepare for a global economic downturn, every source of friction matters. One of the most controllable is website speed.

For many customers, the website is where they first test whether a business is worth their time. They learn about the company, compare products, read content, and, if the experience holds up, buy. Loading time shapes that first impression, affects engagement, and can change whether a visitor becomes a customer.

This article looks at why speed deserves attention when trading conditions tighten. It covers search rankings, conversion impact, and published case studies where faster sites produced measurable gains.

The Need for Speed

Website speed is not an abstract technical score. It is how quickly users can see and interact with content. A delay measured in milliseconds can affect engagement, conversion rates, and customer retention.

Speed matters because user expectations are set by fast services and fast networks. When a page feels slow, people leave and are less likely to return.

Speed also affects how search engines, including Google, rank your website. For businesses trying to remain visible in a crowded market, especially during an economic downturn, performance is a practical lever.

Correlation with Search Rankings

The relationship between website speed and search rankings is supported by research and by statements from Google. A few years ago, Google announced that page speed would be a ranking factor. The change reflected Google's focus on relevant, usable pages.

Websites that meet all of Google's requirements receive a slight advantage, ranking one percentage point higher than the average. These requirements cover several areas, from content relevance and quality to mobile-friendliness and page speed.

By contrast, websites that fail to meet at least one of Google's requirements can sit at a measurable disadvantage, ranking 3.7 percentage points lower. That matters when search visibility is already under pressure.

Google's Core Web Vitals have also become a measurable factor in search rankings. These vitals measure aspects of page speed and user experience, showing how speed and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) now overlap.

A study by Crystallize also found a correlation between speed and SEO. In their page speed score experiment, a page with a high score ranked #1 in Google with a featured snippet for the optimised item. Unoptimised pages with lower speed scores did not appear in search results.

The practical point is straightforward: website speed can improve search visibility. In an economic downturn, that extra visibility can matter.

Conversion Impact of Speed

Speed also affects conversion rates. Deloitte's 'Milliseconds Make Millions' report shows how small improvements in loading time can change commercial outcomes.

The study examined a 0.1 second decrease in loading time across different market sectors. In retail, a quicker page loading time led to an 8.4% rise in conversion rates and a 9.2% improvement in average shopping basket size. The travel sector saw a 10.1% increase in conversion rates and a 1.9% rise in average basket size. For luxury brands, faster loading times resulted in an 8.6% increase in page views per session and an 8.3% decrease in form bounce rates.

Peakhour clients have seen the same pattern. Pharmacy Direct reported a 30% increase in conversions and order value after reducing page load time by 90%. Kitchen Warehouse saw a 150% increase in revenue after decreasing page load times by 70%.

These numbers show that page speed is tied to business metrics, not just technical scores. The scale varies by site and sector, but the direction is consistent across the cited examples.

Real-Life Success Stories

The effects of website speed optimisation are visible in published case studies:

French linen brand Carré Blanc saw a 25% increase in conversion rates after improving web page loading speed.
Renault optimised the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), leading to a 14 percentage point decrease in bounce rate and a 13% rise in conversions.
E-commerce platform eBay found that every 100ms improvement in search page loading time resulted in a 0.5% increase in additions to the shopping cart.
SnipesUSA.com doubled their average conversion rate from about 1% to about 2% by decreasing load times by 30%.
French toy retailer King Jouet enjoyed a 5% increase in conversion rates within a month through page speed optimisation.
AliExpress, a global online retail marketplace, experienced a 10.5% increase in orders and a 27% increase in conversions for new customers by reducing loading time by 36%.
Boutique designer brand Revelry saw 43% faster page loading, an 8% decrease in bounce rates, and a 30% increase in conversions after optimising images on their eCommerce site.
Zalando, an online fashion platform, reported a revenue increase of 0.7% per session by reducing web page loading time by 100ms.
Pinterest observed a 15% increase in platform registrations following an improvement in loading speed.
Telecommunications company Vodafone saw an 8% sales increase with a 31% improvement in Largest Contentful Paint ( LCP).
Mobile marketplace Swappie achieved a 42% increase in mobile revenue by focusing on Core Web Vitals.

These examples show how improving loading speed can lift conversion rates and revenue.

Optimising for Search Performance

Speed also affects search performance beyond organic ranking. Several examples point to paid search impact:

Lever Interactive Agency reported that one of their clients improved their Quality Score, resulting in a 17% decrease in Cost Per Click (CPC), a 31% decrease in Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and a 20% increase in conversion rate on faster landing pages.
Crystallize Headless Commerce noted that scoring high in the Quality Score can lead to significant benefits, including up to a 50% discount on CPC prices. Conversely, a low Quality Score can result in paying up to 400% extra, severely impacting your marketing budget.

Core Web Vitals have also become a priority for eCommerce platform Shopify. The company continues to optimise speed performance to improve search rankings.

These cases show why performance work needs to be ongoing, especially where search traffic and paid acquisition costs are material to the business.

Enhancing Engagement

Engagement is not separate from speed. A fast, well-optimised site gives users less reason to leave and more opportunity to browse, compare, and interact. The data supports this in several ways.

Take eCommerce for instance. Customers are 10% more likely to recommend an eCommerce website when pages load in 10 seconds instead of 13 seconds. The likelihood of recommendation rises to 26% if loading time is reduced to 3 seconds. That shows how quickly performance changes user perception.

Other companies have also seen measurable effects from speed optimisation. Netflix implemented Gzip compression for resource optimisation, resulting in a 43% reduction in outbound traffic. Yahoo Japan News saw increases in both page views per session and session times (15% and 13% respectively), as well as a 1.72% decrease in bounce rate, by improving their Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) by 0.2 points.

Google has also published data linking Core Web Vitals to engagement. Their data showed that favourable Core Web Vitals scores can reduce the likelihood of users abandoning a page before it loads by up to 24%. Meeting Core Web Vitals thresholds also led to an overall 43% improvement in bounce rate for The Economic Times.

The agriculture e-commerce platform, Agrofy, improved their Core Web Vitals scores by 70% for LCP and 72% for CLS, resulting in a 76% reduction in abandonment rate. Again, the useful lesson is not just that the site became faster. It is that users behaved differently once it did.

Key Speed Metrics

Website speed is about more than full-page load time. Several metrics help assess how fast and stable a page feels to a user. Google's Pagespeed Insights lists the following important metrics:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures the time taken to load the largest visible content on the page. The ideal target for this is less than 2.5 seconds. This metric matters because it provides a clear indicator of perceived load speed for the user.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) evaluates the visual stability of a page during loading. The target here is less than 0.1. This helps limit content jumping or shifting while the page loads, providing a smoother user experience.
First Input Delay determines how quickly a page responds to user input, with the target being less than 0.1 seconds. This metric measures the interactivity and responsiveness of a website.

Together, these metrics show whether a website delivers a fast, smooth user experience.

User Expectations and Impact on Business

Users expect pages to respond quickly. When they do not, speed becomes a business issue rather than only an engineering issue.

According to Think with Google, slow-loading pages can affect user experience, resulting in higher bounce rates, negative brand perception, and an impact on conversions and revenue. When users have to wait too long for a webpage to load, they are likely to leave and look for a faster experience elsewhere.

Digital marketing expert Neil Patel highlights that a 1-second delay in page response can lead to a 7% reduction in conversions. To put that into perspective, if an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could cost $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

Akamai also found that 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. This shows the standards modern users have for website performance and the revenue risk for businesses that fail to meet them.

Common Culprits

If your website is running slowly, a few common issues could be to blame. The usual causes are technical and operational:

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is the time it takes for the first byte of data to be received from the server. High TTFB can affect loading times and should be minimised.
Large Page Size and Resources can also contribute to slow loading times. This includes heavy content, such as images, videos, or large files. Optimising these resources can materially improve loading speed.
Third-Party Resources like ads, plugins, or widgets can require additional loading time. While these are often necessary, they need to be managed carefully to avoid excessive loading delays.
JavaScript can be a double-edged sword. While it enables advanced functionality, complex or poorly optimised JavaScript code can also hinder performance.
Single-Page Applications (SPAs) may experience slower initial loading due to their extensive scripting requirements, but they often offer faster navigation once loaded.
Busy Servers Handling Bot Traffic can also cause slowdowns. Bot traffic, in some instances, can account for over 40% of server load. Managing this effectively can help improve website speed.

Understanding which of these factors applies to your site helps you focus performance work where it will matter.

Continuous Monitoring and Performance Optimisation

Getting a site fast once is not enough. Speed can regress as content, third-party tags, releases, and traffic patterns change, so monitoring and performance optimisation need to be continuous.

Tools such as Google's Pagespeed Insights can help track website performance. Regular checks of key metrics can show which issues are slowing the site down and which changes need attention.

It is also important to test improvements on a staging website before deploying them to production. That reduces the risk of disrupting live performance or user experience. Regular diagnostic testing and iterative improvements help keep the site aligned with current performance expectations.

As SEO consulting company Moz highlights, focusing on continuous performance optimisation can have significant benefits. It can help maintain a fast, usable site and support higher search rankings, better engagement, and increased conversions and revenue.

Preparing for the Coming Recession

With an economic downturn on the horizon, a fast, well-optimised website becomes more important. Consumers are likely to be more selective with their spending, and businesses will need to compete harder for each sale.

A fast website can be a useful differentiator in this environment. It can boost your search rankings, making the site more visible to potential customers. It can improve engagement by giving visitors fewer reasons to leave. It can also increase conversion rates, which has a direct effect on sales.

In this context, website speed is not cosmetic. It is an operating requirement. The work is to measure the current experience, fix the main bottlenecks, and keep monitoring performance as the site changes.

The data and case studies point in the same direction: speed optimisation is a practical investment. It helps align the website with user expectations and makes the site a more effective part of the business.

Website speed is measurable, improvable, and commercially relevant. For businesses preparing for tighter conditions, it deserves active management rather than occasional clean-up.

Opencart 3 Full Page Caching Plugin Released

2022-03-25T13:00:00+11:00

Peakhour's Opencart plugin includes features that are usually reserved for enterprise plans with other providers. It follows our 'Enterprise for Everyone' approach in a practical way:

Tag-Based Flushing

Peakhour's plugin records metadata for each Opencart page in the cache. When you update a product or category, only the relevant pages are refreshed. That keeps cache flushing targeted instead of clearing more content than necessary.

Headers returned by caching plugin.

Custom TTL

Control how long a resource stays in the cache before it checks for a new version. This gives you a direct way to manage cache freshness.

Ajax Mini Cart and Wishlist

Dynamic sections like mini carts and wishlists usually prevent caching. The plugin loads these sections via Ajax, which makes more pages cacheable.

Cache Vary

The plugin adapts to different user states, currencies, and languages. It changes a cookie value to create separate cache regions for these variables.

Peakhour vs. LiteSpeed and Varnish Cache

LiteSpeed and Varnish Cache are good options, but Peakhour offers a more flexible and efficient caching solution for Opencart. The plugin makes Opencart as cache-friendly as Magento 2 or Drupal 8, if not more so.

The Results Speak for Themselves

Our client saw a clear improvement in their web vitals scores and website scalability. Full page caching was enabled in October, with the gains shown below.

Full page caching was enabled in October. Note a significant amount of pages, eg checkout, admin etc cannot be cached which affects these stats

For more information, visit our plugin page or contact us.

What is the Google Chrome UX (CrUX) report, and why you should care.

2021-02-26T13:00:00+11:00

A faster website is better for clients: they buy more, and they engage more with your content. However there's someone else that rewards fast websites: Google. Fast websites rank higher in organic search results than slower websites. They will also achieve higher quality scores in Google Ads, resulting in lower ad spend.

We've previously written about Google's Web Vitals, and how Google will be using them as search signals from May 2021. You might have wondered how these Web Vitals will be determined. Will they be gathered by the Google Bot? No. Google has another method, which it has been working on for several years.

Introducing the Chrome UX Report (CRuX)

The CRuX report is a public data set of real-user measurements (RUM) of website performance across millions of sites. The report has been around since 2017 and is updated daily, but until recently the data was difficult to access.

The data is collected from real Chrome browser users who have opted in to send browsing information back to Google. This opt-in requires that the user has:

Opted in to syncing browser history
Not set up a sync passphrase
Usage statistic reporting enabled

Despite these conditions, millions of Chrome users still report statistics back to Google. A given website still needs to be fairly busy before there are useful statistics in the report.

Gathered Metrics

Apart from the Web Vitals, the report also gathers the following event timings:

DOMContentLoaded: when the main document has loaded
onload: when a page and all its associated resources have been downloaded and parsed;

Dimensions

Because performance can vary widely, the metrics are divided into the following dimensions to help segment and understand the user experience.

Country
Device Type: Tablet, Phone, Desktop
Connection Speed: slow 2g, 2g, 3g, 4g, or offline

Viewing data in the report

There are several ways to see how your website performs in the report. These include:

Pagespeed insights

Google's website analysis tool provides summary CRuX data for the analysed URL and, if data is available, for the entire site.

Page Speed Insights Field Data" style="max-width: 100%;margin-bottom: 20px"/>

Google BigQuery

The most flexible option is to access it directly via BigQuery. You query it with SQL (database query language).

The downside is that you need to understand SQL and have a Google account.

Google's Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools)

The search console now has a section 'Core Web Vitals' that shows whether URLs pass the Core Web Vitals, as well as a historical graph of performance for both mobile and desktop.

Google's Data Studio

Data Studio is a data visualisation tool that lets you build dashboards on top of the CrUX report (amongst other big data sources). It lets you create a useful visualisation of the performance of your (or someone else's) website over time.

Third party tools

Like our own competitor speed report. It uses the Chrome UX API to retrieve the information.

Conclusion - Why you should care

The data in the Chrome UX Report is how Google sees the performance of your website. It is also a free source of real-world user measurements of your website performance, which helps you gauge how users see your website. If you want your site to rank well and to lower your ad costs, your website must pass the Web Vitals. The Chrome UX Report is the source of truth.

Are Australian Magento Stores Ready For Web Vitals?

2020-11-19T13:00:00+11:00

Google recently confirmed that the Core Web Vitals will be included as search signals from May 2021. This means that, all else being equal, sites that score well on the Core Web Vitals are likely to rank ahead of those that don't.

A quick refresher of Web Vitals

The Core Web Vitals consist of three metrics, chosen to measure the experience of browsing a website. Here they are, along with the current thresholds for a 'Good', 'Needs Improvement', or 'Poor' rating:

Web Vitals also defines several other metrics, including Time to First Byte (TTFB), and First Contentful Paint (FCP). While these aren't 'core' metrics, they are useful for diagnosing where performance problems come from. The target TTFB in the current version of Google Lighthouse is listed as 100ms, while poor is 600ms. FCP is good under 2s and poor over 4s.

How will Australian sites fare?

We asked a simple question: what percentage of Australian websites are ready for Web Vitals as a search signal, and what percentage could lose ground? To answer it, we ran them through our recently released Website Speed Comparison tool, which gathers Web Vitals metrics as part of its report.

Methodology

There are a lot of Australian websites, so we broke the analysis down by technology platform. We started with online stores running Magento.

We started with an initial list from BuiltWith of around 4000 domains. We then trimmed it down by removing development and demo sites, and sites returning an error, leaving a total of 2998. The list includes some of the largest retailers in Australia, including Harvey Norman, Sportsgirl, Philips and Dyson.

We then ran our competitor report for every one of them. The report was run from our Sydney office over a business-class internet connection. The test throttles the connection to simulate typical 4G mobile phone speeds, and uses a mobile phone user agent/screen size to view the mobile version of the site. We did not throttle CPU performance like Lighthouse does.

NOTE We're excluding First Input Delay in our results as Google defines First Input Delay (FID) as a real user measurement (RUM). FID measures the time taken for the website to respond to the first user interaction, such as clicking a link or button. Technically this interaction can happen any time after the first content appears in the browser; in practice, most people won't click something until after a page is visually complete, and this timing is highly variable. We do measure First Input Delay by simulating a click, but our interaction happens soon after the FCP, while content is still loading. That would cause more sites to fail the metric than would fail in real life, so we're excluding it from our calculations.

On to the results. We did not expect strong numbers, but the results were still worse than expected.

The results

The first check was for the number of websites that achieve a good rating in any of the Web Vitals metrics.

	TTFB (< 0.1s)	FCP (< 1s)	LCP (< 2.5s)	CLS (<.1)
Percentage of sites that are 'Good'
Result	99 (3.3%)	71 (2.37%)	254 (8.47%)	1074 (35.8%)

CLS was the strongest result, which isn't a surprise. The remaining results are not encouraging: only 8.5% pass LCP. Let's see how many need improvement.

	TTFB (< 0.6s)	FCP (< 2s)	LCP (< 4s)	CLS (< .25)
Percentage of sites that 'Needs Improvement'
Result	383 (12.7%)	728 (24.3%)	470 (15.7%)	625 (20.8%)

An additional 15.7% beat the 4s cut-off for LCP. That still means that 3/4 of Australian Magento stores take longer than 4s to visually load on a mobile device. Visualised, the numbers are not pretty.

Australian Magento sites are likely missing potential sales. Recent performance studies show:

The probability of a customer bouncing increases 90% if the page load time increases from 1s to 5s. (source Google)
A 100 millisecond delay in load time can hurt conversion rates by 7%. (source Akamai)

The experience of our own Magento 1 clients and Magento 2 clients backs this up: improving website speed affects conversions and revenue.

Sites that pass all criteria

Of our 2998 websites, we only found 163 that pass Core Web Vital 'good' criteria. That's only 5.5%.

If we again relax to include 'needs improvement' that list grows to 520, or 17.3% of sites tested.

How you can test your site

Google provides online analytics that you can query via BigQuery. If you want to reproduce the report this analysis is based on and compare your website to your competitors, you can use the Peakhour.IO Website Speed Comparison report. We automatically discover your competitors, run them through Web Vitals, and graph the results.

Conclusion

If nothing changes, quite a few Australian Magento stores could lose search visibility in May 2021. The majority of sites don't use Magento 2's ability to cache dynamic pages, and if they do, they're often not serving optimal images.

Core Web Vitals becomes a search signal next year. For Magento teams, it is time to get ready.