The faster your Ecommerce store is, the higher is the percentage of your conversion rate. That is just that simple. As seen from the BuiltWith chart, shopping websites’ owners are the heaviest Magento users. It means that this platform’s extensions and themes really work. Find Out How to Reach the Ultimate Magento Speed! Did you know that about 200 000 webstores with an aggregate turnover of $60 bln. per year operate on this platform? I’ll tell you more: people type in “Magento” with higher frequency than “eCommerce” when using search engines. So, there are some good reasons to go Magento today and check the benefits of this «Best of Open Source Software Awards» winner on own experience. You can achieve Magento speed up on your own with no special efforts. Sometimes, there is no need to spend money. Let’s begin with the simplest ways to do so.
How to Speed Up Magento without Advanced Technical Skills
The first approach is enabling flat categories and products. Categories and Products features are all located in separate database tables. They are sorted by datatypes. So-called ‘flattening’ will collect all features in a single table for Magento retrieve. If the store offers 1,000+ products, the efficiency will be noticeable.
Second, it is useful to merge CSS and JS Files. Any site operating on Magento platform can have many CSS and Javascript files. More of them will appear due to the extensions and customizations. Thus, it is recommended to unite all CSS and Javascript documents into one file which will lead to the faster page loading.
Third, enabling compilation takes all the active scripts in Magento’s core structure and puts them to the front. If updates, code modifications, or extension are required, compilation needs to be disabled first to avoid potential errors for faster website speed. It gives an opportunity to override and extend Magento to your heart’s content. By compiling all files of a Magento installation, it is possible to create a single include path to improved performance. Official Magento team claims that 25 to 50% cases of applying compilation mode resulted in significant performance improvements. Mind that EAV model stands for higher extensibility, but slower SQL requests.
Fourth, select the most appropriate hosting. Even less experienced users can choose hosting that will provide the greatest Magento advantages. Pick one of those hostings capable of reducing the headache of Magento users. It is important to pick optimized servers to gain unique IP-addresses and SSL certificates for separate stores. Amazon EC2 and other cloud hostings are for those Ecommerce owners who are competent with server management. When comparing 2 of the most popular web-services, NginX and Apache, mind that the first one has a better impact on site’s performance, so we would recommend this one.
Finally, manage your cache! Certain caching extensions can be incorporated within Magento’s configuration file while other server tricks to speed up Magento. Of course, there are more caching mechanisms available, but it is too complicated to install them without certified specialists. Note that the maximum effect is achieved when native Magento caching is used with several other techniques such as Varnish and APC cache at the same time.
We have discussed the ways to make your store operate faster with the minimum skills. In some cases, investing in your website development brings better results. Just keep going on and discover more options to speed up Magento today.
How to Speed Up Ecommerce Project through Technical Expertise
1) Clean Database Log
Pay attention to clean database log. A huge database is a barrier for your Magento to better performance. What for should you keep data you have never used? Optimizing database by cleaning log takes no longer than half an hour, but the results are awesome. Because of the tracking, a lot of useless information is stored, but through improving this module, more memory becomes available. This sort of maintenance must be done regularly for the faster Magento site.
2) Distributed Memory Object Caching Systems
By default, Magento allows caching your data by using files or databases. Distributed memory object caching systems like Redis and Memcached along with PHP accelerators are for advanced users only. It would be hard to get to the point without a hosting provider or professional developer. But if you manage to master this method, you will be impressed by the increased speed of your online store.
3) MySQL Configuration
Forget about default configuration! By following Magento’s Yoav Kutner recommendations, there is a way to change server’s MySQL settings in order to use more operative memory of your server.
4) Content Optimization
Making your audience find your content quicker is one more key to success. Content distribution network, for instance, is capable of storing copies of your site at geographically diverse data centers to make your users reach the site faster. Optimizing images is also part of the process: it is necessary to ensure your images do not exceed the desirable sizes. Also, file formats have to be considered (we recommend PNGs for graphics). Reduce the number of fonts used at one page. Get rid of all unused and duplicate components. Use CSS sprites to create a template for frequently applied images like buttons and icons. CSS sprites ease the work by saving load time by not forcing your users wait for multiple images to proceed. By creating the content viewable on any screen despite its size and resolution, you can speed up both websites and mobile sites.
5) Enabling Data Compression
To use this method aimed to receive a faster Magento-based site, one has to archive the transmitted data before it is sent to the client’s browser. This approach allows reducing the bandwidth applied and, as a result, raises the speed of the connection between the server and client. In simple words, data compression allows sending a decreased number of data which results into the reduced download time at the same speed of Internet connection.
6) HTTP Loading Sequence
Rewriting HTTP loading sequence means pushing back all content that isn’t required to start rendering the page. Thus, a website operates faster in all settings and on all connections, unreliable and stable, slow and fast. To explain it step-by-step, it allows loading only visible content first, deferring interactive features, and loading non-essential scripts in the last turn. By the way, make sure all 3rd part assets are loaded asynchronously.
How to Speed Up Magento: Conclusions
To sum up, the basic issues used to speed up Magento are:
- Server environment and database configuration
- Magento configuration
- Caching
- Content optimization (i.e. images and fonts)
- Resources compression
Anyway, optimizing Magento is the best way to make your online store operate faster, get new loyal customers, and increase profitability rates. It does not make any sense to give up Magento’s amazing functionality only because of its speed which can be improved significantly.
