Speed up Magento: 11 Life-Saving Tips for Magento Store Owners

The e-commerce market is booming right now. With this, comes competition as well.

Therefore, the primary motive of this giant sector is to speed up Magento sites to attract more customers while retaining the existing ones.

Use of Magento Websites Today

Magento’s popularity in the marketplace can be seen through the following stats:

According to Google Trends, Magento is one of the most popular platforms:

Why people prefer Magento over others?

Developers opt for Magento for building e-commerce sites for the following reasons:

1. Magento is Open Source

Yes! Magento is Open Source and free to use. The 3 versions of Magento are:

• Magento Community Edition (free)
• Magento Enterprise Edition (paid)
• Magento Go (paid)

Magento Community Edition is used the most by the developers’ community.

Must Read: 5 Steps to Choose Best Magento Hosting Provider

2. No Incremental Charges

You don’t need to pay any extra charges when you grow bigger unlike other ‘made for e-commerce’ platforms like Volusion and Shopify.

3. SEO-Friendly

Magento is considered to deliver SEO benefits, hence giving you greater visibility and organic traffic.

Reasons to Speed Up Magento

If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year – Kissmetrics

• Delays of even 0.5 second can negatively impact business metrics.
• 0.1-second delay can hurt 7% conversions.
• Heavy-weighted pages impact click metrics negatively.
• Server-side delays are the worst and can take down your business

Reasons for Slow Load Time

1. A surge in HTTPS requests.
2. Failure to deploy a Cache system or a Content Delivery Network.
3. Heavy-weighted Web pages.
4. Server Latency

There could be other reasons too but can only be identified after thorough introspection of the website.

Ways to Speed Up Your Magento eCommerce Site

Here, I will discuss admin-level optimizations and server-side tweaks to speed up Magento.

Magento Admin Level Tips

1. Install the latest version
2. Cache management
3. Page Caching
4. Enable flat catalog
5. Merge CSS and Javascript files
6. Clean Magento Logs and Database
7. Image Optimization
8. Have fewer modules and extensions

Server-Side Tips

1. Install a CDN
2. Choose a Magento Specialized Hosting Provider
3. SQL Configuration

Admin-Side Tips

The optimizations you can do via admin panel:

1. Have Latest Version

Always run on the latest version of Magento. Why? They will fix the bugs and improve performance.

Steps to Upgrade Magento

• Install a fresh version of Magento
• Run the installer
• Move over themes and custom extensions from old to new version.

It is difficult to upgrade Magento but with a little assistance here, you will be good to go!

2. Cache Management

Many forms of caching can be implemented. You can combine Nginx + APC + Varnish Caching + Memcache to get the best result.

Although, there is a built-in caching module also but 3rd party solutions seem to achieve better results.

Enable Cache Types by

• “System” → “Cache Management”

3. Page Caching

With page caching, the load is taken off from the web servers. They serve pages already visited before from cache and hence, making Magento site speed way faster.

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Page caching extensions available for Magento are

• Brim’s Full Page Cache
• Zoom Full Page Cache
• Full Page Cache Pro

4. Enable Flat Catalog

Magento is based on EAV model (entity attribute value) to store product and customer data.

What happens when you enable the flat catalog?

• Merges data into one.
• Improves performance by responding to MySQL queries faster.
• Beneficial for those eCommerce stores having 1000+ products.

How to do?

1. Go to “Stores” → “Configuration” → “Catalog.”
2. Under “Storefront” change “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product” to “Yes.”
3. After this, “Save Config” and clear the cache.

5. Merge/Minify CSS and Javascript Files

Merging your CSS and Javascript files into one file will help you reduce the total number of HTTP requests and thereby helping you to speed up Magento site.

There is an inbuilt feature in Magento version <2, you can achieve it by following:

• Navigate to “System”, then go to “Advanced” and further, go to “Developer”.
• Under “JavaScript Settings” and “CSS Settings”, change the dropdown to “Yes” and then “Save Config.”

After combining the files, clear the cache.

6. Clean Magento Logs & Database

Since Magento keeps logs up to 180 days, your database can become heavy.

It is advisable to change the setting to the lowest value, i.e, 14 days and click on “Save Config”.

For manually cleaning up the database, you can:

• In phpMyAdmin, select all of the log_% tables and select “Empty” from the drop-down.
• Select “Yes” when it asks to TRUNCATE the tables.

7. Image Optimization

Since images account for 50% to 60% of your web pages’ total weight (Radware, 2015), it becomes crucial to optimize images to speed up Magento.

Must Read: An Ultimate Magento Security Guide You Need

Benefits of optimizing images:-

• It can dramatically increase the speed of your pages.
• Images can be compressed before uploading with tools like PhotoShop or other auto-optimize tools.

For Magento version <2, users can choose the following extensions:

• Compressor Extension
• TinyPNG Extension

8. Try to Have fewer Extensions & Modules

More the extensions, the more HTTP requests, CSS and Javascript files there will be.

This will result in increased load time. Keep your Magento with as few extensions as possible.

For disabling the modules, you can follow these steps:

1. Navigate to “Stores” → “Configuration” → “Advanced”→ “Advanced”.
2. Click “Disable” on the modules you don’t need. Further, select “Save Config.”

Server Side

1. Install a CDN (Content Delivery Network)

With CDN, you can decrease the load time drastically.

Definition: A Content Delivery Network is a large distributed system of servers that store files and web content closer to the user requesting them.

• Closer the CDN server to a user = Faster content will be delivered to the shopper.
• It ensures that your product images, CSS, and Javascript are loading faster to your users.
• It also offloads some of the server’s stress and leads to fewer processes being required per customer, reduced bandwidth costs, and improved response times.

2. Choose Magento Specialized Web Hosting Providers

Most of the Magento owners make the biggest mistake here. By choosing a poor web hosting provider, you have to always worry about uptime.

You should know how to choose the best Magento hosting provider who can help you improve your Magento performance. 

It would be better to go for a VPS like DigitalOcean, Vultr, or Linode instead of shared hosting where you will have share the resources with hundreds of people.

Well, if you aren’t a techie or don’t really have the time to manage these things, you can go for dedicated managed Magento Hosting which works with these VPS providers and Magento.

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3. MySQL Configuration (Query Caching)

Every time a Magento page is loaded, there are a series of database queries made and the database server must go to work. The long query process takes times and there is slower disk access which results in lower performance.

Solution: MySQL has a built-in configuration parameter known as query_cache_size. This helps to store the result of the query in memory which is much faster than accessing from disk.

Bonus Tip

You can use Magento connect app to get popular extensions and make your site load under 5 seconds!
Don’t have the time or expertise? Talk to our experts and we will analyze, optimize, and manage your Magento site to the best.

Learn More about Magento Performance Optimization.

Image Credits: Keycdn.com