7 Easy tips to improve magento store loading speed in 2017

Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform with a large number of active online merchants using it. Magento is very robust with great flexibility, scalability, and customization. Most of the CMS or eCommerce platforms like Magento and WooCommerce are having issues with speed and their performance degrading over time. Why do we need to optimize Magento performance?

According to KISSMetrics, 40% of the customer will abandon an eCommerce site if it takes longer than three seconds to load. More noticeable, an ONE-SECOND delay in load time can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
As you know by now, Google is using site speed in web search ranking, and not only for Google but mainly for the User Experience (UX) on your eCommerce store.

In this article, we share some tips and tricks on how you can optimize Magento performance of your Magento based eCommerce store.

Tips to improve Magento store loading

1. Latest Version:

Always upgrade to the latest Magento version. Not only will you get more features and bug- and security fixes, but with every update, Magento performs better. You didn't check every time to magneto website to for latest release, Magento does a good job of notifying you of important updates that become available within your messages inbox.

2. Enable Flat Catalog:

Magento uses the EAV model (entity attribute value) to store customer and product data. Enabling the flat catalog for categories and products merges product data into one table, thereby improving performance by responding to MySQL queries faster. If your eCommerce store has more than 1000 products, this can very beneficial.

Login to your Magento Store as admin
Navigate to “System” → “Configuration” → “Catalog.”
Under “Frontend” change “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product” to “Yes.”
Click on “Save Config.”
Clear the cache. The recommended way to do this is to delete everything from the /var/cache directory. You can also do it by navigating to “System” → “Cache Management” and clicking on “Flush Cache Storage” which is equivalent to deleting all the cache.

3. Cache & Indexers:

There are many forms of caching that can be implemented with Magento. Combining NGINX + APC + Memcache + Varnish caching is a great way to success. Magento also comes with a built-in caching module as well. One more thing using Magento's page caching. It reduces the web server processing load is taken off from the web server by serving pages already visited before from a cache which makes it a lot faster. There are lots of pages caching extensions available for Magento you can choose according to your requirement.

Using a PHP accelerator is another form of caching. They increase the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state. You can use a PHP accelerator like APC, Xcache, eAccelerator etc.

As we know Magento has lots of feature one of them is the indexer. Magento updates indexes on every object store by default, but in some cases, manual updates are required. Basically, indexes are used to speed up Database queries.

4. Code and Database Optimization:

Use a PHP accelerator like Zend and uninstall unnecessary PHP or Apache modules you don’t need or use. Improve your database performance using query indexing and broad optimization scripts. Use your DB management system to optimize the database on the frequent basis.

Magento has a compilation feature which has been reported to sometimes give up to a 50% performance boost. By default, Magento’s application files are searched in a certain order every time the page loads, which results in a lot of filesystem reads. In Magento admin, (top menu) System > Tools > Compilation, click Enable. This will take all the active scripts in Magento’s core structure and bring them to the front for faster website speed. The Magento compiler reduces these reads by copying all of these files into a single include directory and also caches ones that are used more frequently.

Optimizing your product images can dramatically increase the speed of your pages as this decreases their download times. You can compress them before uploading them using a tool like PhotoShop or there are a number of extensions you can use to auto-optimize them like TinyPNG Extension.

5. Merge CSS & JS:

Magento actually has a built in feature to concatenate (merge) your CSS and Javascript files into one file. This will reduce your total number of HTTP requests and in turn help speed up the loading of your pages. By using the advanced configuration in Magento admin, you can merge you JavaScript and CSS files, this reduces the load time. Please be aware that merging your javascript files may cause issues that need to be further resolved, but in the end, it certainly is best for your store.

6. Use CDN:

Implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) with Magento is one of the easiest ways to instantly see decreased load times. Using a content delivery network (CDN) such as MetaCDN enables serving your assets from a location geographically closest to your customers and hence reduces latency and increases download speed for those assets. Magento lets you define where certain assets (CSS, javascript, images, etc.) are loaded from such as a URL pointing to a CDN. Magento CDN integration guide for details how to integrate the MetaCDN Site Accelerator into your Magento installation.

7. Hosting environment:

And last but not least, choosing a reliable and fast web host can be one of the most important decisions you will make when trying to improve Magento performance. We recommend staying away from shared hosting as they tend to overcrowd their servers and you will end up sharing resources between hundreds of website. We suggest going with a VPS like socialfoxhosting.com, Digital Ocean, Linode etc. The reason is that you will be in complete control of your resources.

Conclusion

There are many ways to optimize Magento performance for your Magento based eCommerce site. Some of them we have discussed here. If you suffer from slow Magento performance, we can help you with Magento optimization to speed up Magento in no time! Making sure your eCommerce solution is running fast is one of the most important factors to your sales, SEO rankings, and overall best user experience.

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