Magento installations are known for having issues with speed and performance degrading over time. Optimizing the speed of Magento installation is very important for several reasons. Firstly, speed allows your customers to have the best user experience possible while shopping in your eCommerce store. It reduces abandonment rate. Customers will abandon a website that takes so much time to load.
Magento is one of the most robust eCommerce platform till date. It has many advantages but its heavy-weight structure is known to carry some performance challenges. To reduce the slow loading site you need to optimize the Magento site on a regular basis.
Here are few measures that can be taken to optimize the overall Magento performance.
1) Keep Updated
Always update Magento installations to the latest versions as newer releases may contain bug fixes which contributes to the overall performance and security patches against all known vulnerabilities. Upgrading Magento is a bit tough task when compared to other CMS or E-Commerce applications like Woo Commerce.
2) Hosting Environment
Always choose a hosting suitable to your needs. Choose a server which can handle heavy traffic and accept more number of connections and in turn serve all the requests without any delay or load spike. If the load is reaching its peak value in the server due to traffic, it is time to upgrade the server. The resources like CPU and RAM are to be upgraded for better performance. Placing the server in a geographical area near to the targeted audience is the best practice.
3) Compress Images
There may be images in Magento installation. The images are used by both Magento installation and the catalog. Images (PNG, JPG) can be compressed, which lowers the bandwidth between the browser and the web server. Sprite Images have proven to be a reliable way for Magento website speed optimization. Under Sprite image methodology, all the images used in the website will be merged/combined under a single source image. That resultant source image will be placed in an exclusive URL with a single http request.
4) Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN is essentially a network of geographically dispersed servers. Each CDN node (also called Edge Servers) caches the static content of a site like the images, CSS/JS files and other structural components. The majority of an end-user’s page load time is spent on retrieving this content, and so it makes sense to provide these “building blocks” of a site in as many server nodes as possible, distributed throughout the world.When a user requests your site, the node closest in proximity to user will deliver the static content, ensuring the shortest distance for the data to travel (reduced latency), therefore providing the fastest site experience.
Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with Magento is one of the easiest ways to instantly see decreased load times.
5) Disabling Unused Modules
Every CMS installations will use certain modules for there working. In fact, there may be other modules which are installed, and may not be a necessity for a particular Magento installation. Modules can either be disabled directly from the Magento administrator or from system XML files for Magento speed optimization. In some cases, disabling a module from the store administrator will not prevent the entire module from loading. Removing the module through edits to the store XML is typically the best bet.
6) Enable Caching
Magento comes with a built in caching module, which can be used for caching rather than installing a third party module. However, third party caching modules will perform a way better than the Magento’s own caching module.
Varnish cache is a splendid way for Magento speed optimization if your website is heavy with content. As a reverse proxy, varnish cache quickens your speed loading page using a cached version of the site than making a new request each time the page is visited. Combining NGINX, APC, Memcache and Varnish caching have astonishing results over other methods.
7) Using PHP accelerator and configuring PHP settings
PHP accelerator is another remedy for Magento Page Speed Optimization. The accelerator is basically an extension that caches all PHP scripts used in the web page thus doing away with the need to parse the scripts repeatedly when the visitor logs into the page.
Fine tuning the PHP settings like max-execution_time and memory_limit (which can be accessed from the store’s root directory) will also help in improving Magento Site Speed optimization.
8) Database Optimization
Database optimisation can be done by query indexing and broad optimization scripts. Magento keeps logs up to 180 days. This can result in database growing quite large. This can be changed to a very smaller frequency, so that we could prevent database from growing in size. This can be done within Magento Settings.
9) Fewer Extensions
The more the extensions, the more the HTTP requests there are, as well as additional CSS and Javascript files having to load. It is best to keep your Magento install down to as few extensions as possible.You can also disable modules that you don’t use. This would help in reducing the load times considerably.
10) Use Magento Compiler module
The Magento Compiler core module limits the number of directories that PHP has to search through when looking for PHP-files. This decreases the PHP execution-time, which speeds up the Magento application in general.
Great care has to be taken when making changes to the Magento system, while the Magento Compiler is enabled. Magento should not be upgraded while the compiler is enabled. To speed up Magento tremendously, create a tmpfs-mount specifically for the includes/src folder. The tmpfs-mount needs to be at least 100Mb – preferably 200Mb.
11) Update Indexes
Magento updates indexes on every object store by default, but in some cases manual updates are required. Indexes are used to speed up MySQL queries. The index settings can be managed from Magento Settings, System >> Index Management.
12) Store Optimizations
Since Magento is an e-commerce platform and it will be having stores with products for sale. It is always preferred to manage the store with the product’s relevance. Delete out-of-stock products rather than piling up which makes it difficult to manage and makes the installation slow. Also, take care to limit the number of products on the product overview page.
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