Magento Speed Optimization Archives - Custom Software Development Services

Magento Speed Optimization Techniques- How to Speed up Your Online Store?

Posted on June 20, 2024September 24, 2024 by Mitesh Prajapati

Magento, being one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, most enterprises choose to rely on it to build online stores. It offers a variety of themes and customization options that every business would want to provide its customers. And hence, the platform is famous for its versatile yet high-performing quality.

Among the top 100,000 eCommerce websites, 16% of them are using Magento as their eCommerce framework, and the number becomes 22%, including the Magento Enterprise plans. The number is enough to believe the significance of the eCommerce framework.

To ensure your eCommerce store remains high-performing, there are specific speed optimization steps to follow. These Magento development services can help merchants address multiple issues related to website performance, from loading speed to navigation and overall user experience.

Why does Website Speed Matter for e-commerce?

According to a survey, people take all of five seconds to decide whether they want to be on a website or not. If a website is slow, people move on to other websites. This is why website speed matters a lot in e-commerce. The main idea is to make visitors stay on your website longer than five seconds. This will help you with getting more customers and increase sales.

How does a slow-loading Website Affect Sales?

A slow-loading website, as mentioned above, is enough to drive away potential customers. If they don’t spend time on the website, there wont be any sales. A slow-loading website means you lose visitors and customers at the same time. In order to have sales, you need people who will spend time on your website as mentioned above. This way you will get to have increased sales as well.

What are the common Issues With Magento Website Performance?

As mentioned above, slow speed is a primary issue with a Magento website. Other issues include the following:

Poor hosting
Incorrect operating modes
A problematic caching system
Excessive use of extensions or themes

Let’s discuss some essential speed optimization techniques in Magento. It should help you increase website loading speed and hence, a good customer engagement ratio.

Cache Management

There are multiple forms of caching you can implement with Magento to enhance performance. Successful combinations include NGINX, APC, MemCache, and Varnish caching. The framework also provides a built-in cache management module, but developers should ensure that these cache types are enabled.

In addition to server-side caching, optimizing browser caching is crucial for speed optimization. This can be achieved by adding a .htaccess file and enabling Gzip compression. While the latest versions of Magento typically have this setting enabled by default, older versions may require manual configuration.

For effective implementation of these caching strategies, it’s advisable to hire Magento developers who can ensure that your caching system is optimized for the best performance.

Content Delivery Network

It’s important to serve your website visitors with immediate content. Especially when you have an eCommerce website and visitors instantly want the products on the display. It becomes frustrated for visitors to wait for longer waiting times. To optimize it, you need to manage it with a content loading mechanism.

To see a positive change in your website loading time, implementing a content delivery network always works. It is one of the easiest methods to decrease website loading time. You can get the content loaded for your website visitors from different locations around the world. So the buyers can easily navigate through the product images and related animations.

Image Optimization

Images can significantly slow down your website if they are not optimized. Large image sizes in MBs consume more space, increasing the waiting time for product pictures to load. Prospective buyers prefer a seamless experience, making it crucial to display optimized images that load quickly.

You can enhance the performance of your Magento 2 site by optimizing images. By compressing image sizes and converting product images to JPEG format, you can achieve a notable improvement in loading speed. Additionally, keeping layout and logo images in PNG or SVG formats is essential to maintain the website’s look and feel.

For those looking to implement these optimizations effectively, a Magento 2 upgrade service can provide the necessary tools and expertise to ensure your images are optimized for the best performance.

Installing Varnish

Varnish is an open-source full-page cache accelerator to increase the HTTP level traffic. Since the plugin is faster than the built-in cache accelerator, configuring it to the website makes perfect caching for eCommerce websites. It caches the parts of your webpage like fragments of files in temporary memory. Hence, it increases page loading speed and reduces response times. It helps with the entire HTTP protocol to overcome the problems with servers which are giving slower response times in bigger eCommerce websites.

To configure Varnish in your Magento Admin panel:

Stores > Configuration > Advanced > System >Full Page Cache
Caching Application List > Varnish Caching
Enter value in TTL for Public Content Field
Enter the specific information by expanding the Varnish Configuration field.

Full Page Cache

Magento 2 has made it easy to implement full-page cache. You don’t need to use a false attribute to exclude a block since it considers an entire page in which the block is residing. You can check on multiple pages where cacheable attributes are used to see whether the pages have problems with caching. There are also manual techniques to cache the full page. You can do it by putting the store in development mode on a local or staging environment.

This is one of the essential tricks that developers use to optimize Magento stores.

Minimize JS and CSS

Javascript and CSS can slow down your Magento website by increasing the number of requests. Minimizing these files can speed up magento website. Here is how to do it. In the admin panel of the website, you need to navigate to the developer settings. Then you need to go to javascript settings and CSS settings and merge them together.

Improve TFFB

This is one of the key factors to consider while optimizing the speed of your Magento website. TFFB or Time to First Byte is the time taken between a request and the first server response. This means that your server needs to be quick at all times. Improving the TFFB will make your website faster and it will be able to retain potential customers.

Enable Expire Headers

Before learning about enabling expire headers, let us talk about why do you need them. Expire headers are there to inform the browsers about when it should request a file from your server. They also inform the browser to clear up the cache. This means a visitor to your website doesnt need to wait for the website to reload if they are visiting it for the second time. This is why you need to enable expire headers for your website.

Check Third Party Extensions

Magento websites are known as slow moving and heavy. This is because most of the time it’s working with a lot of third party extensions. Checking on these extensions and removing the unused ones can make your website light and fast in no time at all. This is one of the best ways to ensure that your Magento website runs smoothly at all times and offers your visitors a pleasant experience.

Here are some Magento Extensions which can be helpful to your online store: Best Magento Extensions

Conclusion

It would be best if you follow the best coding practices while developing online stores. It comes with experience, in-depth knowledge about the eCommerce framework and with the support of an extensive range of plugins that the framework offers. Of course, it’s no easy task to speed up the eCommerce website altogether but we can do it with practice, right tools and experience.

Share your views on Magento Speed Optimization techniques with us in the comment section. Also, connect with us on Twitter for more updates on eCommerce technologies.

FAQs

What is Magento?

Magento is an e-commerce platform that provides merchants with a digital online store. It includes powerful tools for managing catalogues and for search engine optimization. Magento is the best e-commerce platform for big companies because of the features it offers.

Where can I host my Magento website?

You can host your Magento website on any good and efficient hosting provider. However, there are a number of requirements that are required for hosting a Magento website. You can find the list of requirements on the official website of Magento.

How to get support for Magento?

The best way to get support for Magento would be through an expert on Magento websites. You can find such experts both offline and online. You can also post your question on Magento forums and get them answered by Magento experts.

What is the benefit of Magento?

As mentioned above, Magento is suitable for big companies because of the various features it offers. Along with all these, it also offers many in-built tools for customizing and presenting your website in the most effective way.

Is Magento generally slow?

Magento does have a reputation for being slow because of its loading speed. However, you can work around the various tools and features to make your website faster.

What can Magento be used for?

As mentioned above, Magento is an e-commerce platform meant for online stores. If you own a business, you can display your products and sell them using the Magento platform.

Speed Up Magento 2 Store in 10 Steps

Posted on March 2, 2021May 6, 2024 by Mitesh Prajapati

With the rapid change in the evolution of technologies, online shopping has become a preferred medium for every buyer. Today, our market is filled with some of the Best Ecommerce CMSs , such as Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, Opencart, BigCommerce, etc. However, Magento 2 is considered as one of the most extensively used eCommerce platforms in the world. Every new ecommerce store and startups opt for Magento 2 as their base platform. Did you know, 65% of B2B organizations have an e-commerce site to launch at the end of one year and Magento occupies the share of 1.4% of CMS in the market in 2020.

The way that Magento 2 is structured is quite mesmerizing in its own way, because it saves cost and time it takes to develop an ecommerce store. Although, it does have the knock-on effects of slow speed and increased loading time if Magento 2 store is not setup correctly. Almost every eCommerce owner dilutes each sinew to reduce page loading time. Although, ensuring stable and constant website performance remains the most challenging task in Magento 2 website.

Here, we are going to share the main reasons that make your Magento 2 slow, and how you can speed up your Magento 2 Store.

But for that, you need to understand “What is Magento 2?” and “Why is your Magento 2 store responding slow?”.

Scroll Down!!

So, What is Magento?

“Magento is an open source ecommerce CMS platform.”

Let’s break it down!

Open source is a software where original code is released under a license, it is made freely available where it can be altered, enhanced, and modified according to developers’ needs.
Ecommerce is a software that allows business transactions to be conducted electronically. It is an application used to sell services and products online.
CMS stands for Content Management System, It’s an application that is being used to handle all content related to products and services in one central location.

Thus, Magento is an Open Source Ecommerce Content Management System.

Why is Magento 2 so slow?

By default, Magento 2 speed is not slow, the default store is pretty smooth and robust. High loading time in Magento 2 store causes lack of knowledge in optimizing the website and the misconduct. If the basic requirements such as usage of inappropriate third extensions, not enabling the right plugins, disabled full page cache, etc. can cause slowing of speed in your Magento 2 store. Thus, Magento is not slow but when you see the increase in loading speed of your store, that’s the time when you should start optimizing your site to reduce the loading speed and make your store more astonishing and smooth to use.

Any site depends on, if the delay time to start the page is more than expected, you can lose a bunch of potential customers due to slow speed.

So, how will you speed up the Magento site of your own?

Here, we present to you some of the most useful ways that will help you revamp your Magento site performance to its best.

Ways to speed up Magento 2 store

#1 Choose a Local Web Server

Magento is quite a powerful store, thus hosting your Magento store on a dedicated server is required instead of shared hosting for Magento.

While building servers, the default settings to host the server is usually in the US. Having a server so far away is going to result in an increased delay on your server, because the information has to bounce forwards and backward overseas. Thus, if you are based in a different country, you should use the server of your country itself.

If you don’t have the server available in your country, get one that is closest to you or you can turn to a different provider.

Using a server of your own country can speed up the Magento 2 store performance. Thus, your website visitors won’t have to wait for your site to wait for more.

#2 Enable All Magento Caches

There are various practices that need to be performed to speed up Magento site including cache.

Here is the step-by-step guide that will help you enable every single Magento store cache in order to improve the Magento 2 loading speed.

How will you enable all Magento 2 Cache?

Follow the trail of steps:

Step 1: Head to

System -> Cache Management

Step 2: Here, You will have to tap on “select all” cache types in order to enable all.

Step 3: Tap on drop down and select “Enable”.

Step 4: And Hit “Submit”.

When all cache types are enabled, you’ll start to notice that pages you visit will be cached into the system. So, the second time you visit, the page will load faster.

Note: Apply for both front end and back end.

#3 Enable Flat Catalog Category and Product

Enabling flat category and product is a form of database caching, which will result in faster loading of information on the front end of your Magento 2 website. It gets almost all necessary attributes from various tables into your store database, and merges them into one easily accessible file. Here, you can choose which attributes will get merged into your flat catalog by adjusting your categories and products.

To Enable flat category and product follow these steps:

Step 1: Head to

Store-> Configuration

Step 2: In “Configuration” section, open Catalog and again open the Catalog option inside it.

Step 3: Open “Storefront” option in Catalog section

Step 4: In Storefront, scroll down to “Use Flat Catalog Category” & “Use Flat Catalog Product”. If it is not enabled, then turn them to “Yes” in both categories.

Step 5: Once both catalog category and product is in enable mode. Go to “Store” again and tap on “Product”.

Step 6: Once you open the “Product” category, you’ll have to select one attribute. Here, we choose the “Color” attribute.

Step 7: In the “Attribute information” section, open “Storefront properties”.

Step 8: In “Storefront Properties”, Scroll to “Used in Product Listing” and enable it.

#4 Disable JavaScript Bundling

Purpose of the setting is to optimize Magento 2 site speed by bundling groups of JavaScript files together, this will limit the number of requests that a web browser has to make to the server.

However, micromanaging what files are bundles can be quite difficult. This can result in a buggy experience on the front end and all the JavaScript files can result in being larger than they need to be.

Remember to keep your JavaScript Enable.

Step 1: Head to

Store-> Configuration

Step 2: In the Configuration section, scroll down to the “Advanced” tab on the left panel, and in that, open “Developer” section.

Step 3: In the Developer section, open “JavaScript Settings” and go to “Enable JavaScript Bundling” option. You have to keep it disabled the entire time.

#5 Keep up with Magneto Updates

Things like old-bugs and optimization opportunities gets in highlight with the release of more patches of updates. With the release of more patches, For that you will have to keep your Magento website functionality updated. Want to know how to check it?

Step 1: Head to

System-> Web Setup Wizard

Step 2: In Web Setup Wizard, Update your Magento store by tapping on “System Upgrade”.

#6 Keep 3rd Party Extensions Updated

Not updating 3rd party Magento 2 extensions can cause many problems with your Magento 2 website functionality. Thus, keeping it updated can help you enhance your Magento 2 site speed.

To update 3rd party extensions in your Magento 2 store, follow these steps:

Step 1: Head to

System -> Web Setup Wizard

Step 2: Select “Extension Management”.

Step 3: Action -> Update

#7 Remove Unused Magento 2 Extension

With the time, your website will grow, and then the time will come when you’ll realise that some of the extensions are not the best-fit where some of them will forfeit their functionality. That is the time when you have to remove those unused Magento 2 Extension.

Step 1: Head to,

System -> Web Setup Wizard

Step 2: In Web Setup Wizard, tap on “Module Manager”

Step 3: Go to the Module Manager and there you’ll see each and every module of Magento. With every module, there is an Action button from where you can disable the module that is not important for you.

#8 Schedule Indexing

There are good amount of chances that your indexes modes will be set to update on save. This will work best if you have a few hundred products on your website, but if you have a few thousand products, then you might find your Magento store a little sluggish after you make changes to your categories and products.

In your Magento 2 store, it is much more efficient to change the modes to update by schedule. By this, you can schedule indexing to take place on various intervals during the day, which also helps reduce bottlenecking. The only downside you’ll face will be; until the index takes place ,your changes will now display on the front end until the index has taken place.

Now, how to schedule indexing?

Follow these steps:

Step 1: Head to

System-> Index Management

Step 2: Select the indexes and select “Update by Schedule”

Moreover, It is not necessary to update by schedule but, If you do decide to change this to update by schedule, then you can amend this schedule by:

Step 3: Head to

Stores-> Configuration

Step 4: In Configuration section, open Advanced tab on left panel, and in that open “System” option.

Step 5: As you selected “Update by schedule” in Index Management. You’ll be able to see the accessible option to change the time and schedule index according to your time.

#9 Disable All Debug Logs

Sometimes you can find debug logs as a very heavy resource on your Magento 2 store. These types are just vlogs, that tend to write large files to your system that aren’t necessary. Your final results may differ between seeing no difference to seeing a little difference in store optimization.

Debugs logs are normally off by default, it’s always worth checking to check your setup from time to time.

To check your setup go to:

Step 1: Head to

Store-> Configuration

Step 2: Open “Advanced” in the left tab,in that, open “Developer”.

Step 3: Set “No” in log to file. If not then make sure to select “No”.

#10 Merge JS And CSS File

Unmerged Javascript and CSS are one of the main reasons that causes high loading time in your Magento 2 eCommerce store. Here, Eliminate redundant or unnecessary data with this process. And after merging these files, it cannot be modified.

Reduction in the number of requests to the server due to merging of JavaScript and CSS will ultimately give better results in loading time of the store.

Follow these steps to Merge JavaScript and CSS files:

Step 1: Head to

Store-> Settings-> Configuration

Step 2: On left panel, expand the “Advanced” tab, in that select “Developer” option

Step 3: Expand CSS Settings, now in “Merge CSS File” set “Yes”

Step 4: In the Developer section, open “JavaScript Settings”. In that, set the “Yes” in “Merge JavaScript Files”.

Step 5: Save Configuration!

Takeaway

Magento 2 is very vast, there are numerous ways to speed up your Magento 2 site. Here, the choice is yours! Choose the ways that are most suitable for your Magento 2 site. All you need to remember is: Faster and nicely optimized your personal site development environment is, faster your eCommerce Magento store will be in competition.

The above mentioned tips will help you increase Magento 2 site speed. Well, it is true that a well optimized Magento eCommerce store provides a faster and overwhelming browsing experience to its users. Therefore, with these tips, experience the best engagement rate and conversion rate.

For more tips, check out our article on Magento Speed Optimization. Also, check out some of the most astonishing eCommerce trends in 2021. All you need is to go with the trend and make your website powerful as much as you can.

Ciao!