It is a major complaint from Magento Ecommerce website owners that their website is not loading as fast as they want it to be? Are you the same problem? Ensure that your Magento website is running rapid is one of the most essential factors to your sales, SEO rankings, cart abandonment rate, and overall user experience on your website. In this article, we have tried to put together the ways to improve loading speed of your Magento ecommerce website; we hope that it will be helpful.
Here are some essential ways to speed your Magento E-commerce Websites:
Updated and Secure
Large number of leaks and attacks on Magento stores have been reported due to missing security updates and version upgrades Magento provides from time to time. It is very vital that your Magento version is updated to latest version released by Magento. All update is released by Magento delivers bug fixes and performance improvements.
Enable Cache
There are mainly 3 types of cache. First is your Magento cache, another is Server cache and third one is External cache. For the server cache and external cache you need some basic knowledge to get that sorted out and make sure they are in working condition. To use Magento cache follows below steps:
Navigate to Admin -> System -> Cache Management Select all Cache type then Select Enable from Actions drop down and click on Submit button.
Now you want to enable browser cache so that whenever content of your Magento website is loaded on your customers browsers it saves the content so on next visit the site loads much faster.
For this you have to insert below content in your .htaccess file. It’s very important that you take backup of this file in case if this doesn’t work and you have to revert it back. If you are not sure about modifying this file then it would be best to get help from Magento E-commerce Development Company.
Enable Flat Catalog
Magento offers you a serviceability to use Flat Catalog information for your Products and Categories to improve the performance of your store to serve the items for better user experience. Enabling this option stores your current catalog data into few tables and serves directly from those to your customers instead of going through its default architecture to get catalog data. Go to Admin -> System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Frontend tab -> set both options to yes as below screenshot.
Updated Indexes
Magento has indexes for all the catalog data, item stocks and URLs. Keep your Magento Store’s indexes always updated so that any changes you make in your catalog information reflects right away on your website front side otherwise your customers will see old prices or prices out of stock for available items. You can set your store’s indexes to update automatically every time you save the catalog information or you can set it to update manually.
To update it manually go to Admin -> System -> Index Management -> Select All and Reindex
Image Optimization
To optimize the images you can use any image procession software/tool and re-upload the images or you can go to GTMetrix website. From the site submit it for analysis and it will show you a list of images which can be optimized. It provides optimized images there so you can just download new optimized images and then go to specific paths on your server using FTP or Control panel and re-upload.
Merge CSS and Javascript
The Magento E-commerce website can cause fast delay which contains many design files and scripts. This means you have to make sure that your website theme is optimized. You can integrate all CSS with one or two files and develop speed and performance by doing the same with Javascript.
Go to Admin -> System -> Advanced -> Developer
Under “JavaScript Settings” and “CSS Settings” change the dropdown to “Yes” and click on “Save Config.”
Clear your Magento cache after it to reflect the changes on website front pages. If your theme is a complex one and using many jQuery plugins then merging JavaScript may break your layout or many functionality of your website. If that happens then it would be best to leave it unmerged or hire Magento experts to help on that part Enable Compilation
Magento provides a feature to get better performance by running compilation process. Basically what it does is store all the files of Magento which are required to run your store on browser in one place and loads it from there instead of using the general Magento framework structure. This reduces time of searching for each file in the structure and results in better performance.
To use this feature go to Admin -> Tools -> Compilation -> click on Run Compilation Process
This will result in error if any of your extensions are conflicting or your server does not have sufficient space. These are some of the essential way to speed up your Magento E-commerce Website.
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