How to Improve the Performance of Your Magento eCommerce Store
One of the biggest concerns of most eCommerce stores is the site performance, precisely its speed. If you’re using Magento and you have this problem, there are several steps that you can do to boost the site speed. Doing so will offer a better shopping experience leading to more sales and a better customer retention rate.
Here are six tips to optimize Magento performance:
1) Install the Latest Version
Visit Magento to see if you’re running the up-to-date version of their software. If this is not the case, follow the thorough procedures to update it. It’s critical to use the most recent Magento version to fix bugs and improve speed.
To update the software version:
- Install the latest version
- Run the installer
- Transfer the themes and extensions from the old to the new version
- If you have a problem doing this yourself, feel free to contact their customer support.
2) Use Full-Page Caching
Page caching is an excellent way to reduce the number of database transactions required for each page request and thus speed up website loading. Users can get the information they need much faster when browsing a cached page version.
Varnish is a popular Magento caching solution. However, it uses the database for most requests, which may cause it to become overburdened, particularly during traffic peaks.
Specialized add-ons may entirely cache a page even without opening Magento, significantly reducing server demand and faster page loading and browsing.
3) Optimize Image Files
Surprisingly, most online business owners overlook the importance of image optimization for their shops. The photos that have been compressed load faster than those that are not. You may use well-known picture editors like Adobe Photoshop to shrink the image file size or online image optimization sites, such as TinyPNG and Online Image Compressor.
Image lazy loading is another approach to optimize pictures in Magento. Thanks to this simple feature, the images on the website are only changed as the visitor scrolls down the page. As a result, the time it takes for a page to load is cut by half or even faster.
4) Enable Flat Catalog
Categories and product characteristics are maintained in separate database tables in Magento. You may consolidate all product data into one instance by activating the flat catalog for categories and products. Doing this improves website performance by reducing the time it takes for the system to reply to database requests.
This is especially important when dealing with huge product catalogs, including hundreds of products.
5) Remove Unused Extensions
As a very versatile and scalable eCommerce platform, Magento allows customers to add third-party modules to extend its features. However, installing too many extensions might hurt the website’s performance.
Keeping track of your Magento extensions is a good idea. Determine which modules you use the most and eliminate any that have shown to be useless. Your website should only use Magento extensions that have been proven to work.
6) Consider Stop Using JS Bundling
Magento 2 has a unique feature called JS bundling. This feature claimed to reduce the number of HTTP requests necessary to load a page. While the feature was intended to boost performance, it might have the opposite effect.
If you enable JS bundling, a large 5-10MB file containing all the JavaScript code will be created. A file of such size would slow down the page load time.
