Summary of the best Articles on Magento Optimization

Magento Optimization Article Summaries and Our Take on Them

Out of many online resources on Magento optimization we review our three top picks, summarizing the key insights and adding our own comments about each. We would love to hear what you think about this selection and whether you took any advice provided in the articles below.

Magento Settings Optimization

1. Understanding Magento Scalability and Performance by Visions New Media Staff (Visions New Media) Performance and scalability are hot topics: everybody wants to have the shortest loading time possible, which is what we mean by performance, and to serve as many as possible customers when traffic spikes, or what is referred to as scalability. Getting Magento to be fast and scalable requires some knowledge of the underlying software stack, such as the web server and PHP configuration, and a little custom development to optimize Magento’s caching for your specific use case. My Comment: A great resource on the basics of Magento is – surprisingly, but in the spirit of the open source community – is the Magento knowledge base’s guest blog posts. The author dismisses the accusations of Magento being a slow platform (which was true in the past, but no longer) and jumps into some basic level code to avoid the most common errors.

Magento Extension Optimization

2. How To Achieve a 2 Second Page Load with a Magento eCommerce Store by MaxCDN Staff (MaxCDN) Full page load (document complete) within 2.5 seconds seems to be the Holy Grail in performance, and this is still a possibility even for pages weighed down with heavy images. My Comment: If you don’t mind a bit of advertising of the company’s product, MaxCDN do provide quite a bit of technical performance guidelines and lessons learned about better ways of using plugins and extensions.

Magento Code Optimization

3. Do you know how well your Magento site was built? by Customer Paradigm Staff (Customer Paradigm) While every well optimized Magento store has its secrets, common threads affect stores that fail to build a web store that’s secure, upgradeable and without code conflicts. For the tech savvy, Customer Paradigm offers a Magento Code Audit tool automatically creates a detailed site build audit, automating a task that otherwise takes hours when done by hand. My Comment: Even experienced Magento developers can overlook certain settings, given that Magento is almost infinitely customizable. If you are an store owner with a knack for learning code or a time-pressed Magento developer (hi!) you can use the article’s fairly comprehensive checklist of settings to keep track of. The article itself is fairly helpful in its own right and the adventurous souls can even download the audit tool and use it to get an automated report that scans the most common problem areas. Which blogs do you read and find useful in keeping your Magento store running spiffy? Please share them – and also let us know what you think about the articles we reviewed!