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Magento is one of the most widely and popular e-commerce platform used by businesses across the globe to increase their online presence. Having a digital presence has become obligatory for the businesses at present and therefore, there are millions of e-commerce websites running online.
With millions of e-commerce websites running online, there is high competition among online retailers. One major factor which decides the success rate of a website is its loading speed and quick response time. According to a study, in just 3 seconds, the target audience decides whether to navigate and stay on a website or not and this proves the importance of website speed.
If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1-second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year – Kissmetrics
To attract the target audience and cope up with the pressure to have a mobile-optimized site and desktop optimized site, here are a few tips that will help in improving the speed of your Magento store:
1. Google Page Speed Tool
To begin with the optimization, it is important to take a website speed test using one of the tools available online. The most popular tool which is used by companies in the “Google Page Speed Tool”. It gives the detailed score and results of the performance of the website for desktop as well as other devices. Using the data obtained further improvements can be easily made.
2. Use the latest version
The first step is to check whether you are using the upgraded version of Magento or not. This is because the updates usually fix the bugs and improve performance speed. So, never miss out the notifications sent by Magento for updates.
3. Optimize time to first byte
Time to first Byte (TTFB) or server response time consists of the time when a browser’s request goes to the server and server response come back to the browser and the time taken by the server to generate HTML. According to Google, this time should just be 200ms and if it exceeds that, then it is considered bad for the website. Magento codebase can be inspected thoroughly to reduce the server response time.
4. Right Magento Server Configuration
While optimizing the Magento store, it is important to pay attention to the little details. To optimize server configuration, it is important to choose the right hosting and setting up server software. While choosing the host, the performance of the hosting server should be the priority and not the money and a maximum number of resources should be configured. These are the basis of the online store and decide the success of it too.
5. Proper Caching
Magento comes with a few built-in caching modules but to improve the overall speed of the website, moving for third party caching options helps in achieving better results. Browser caching, Page caching are the most powerful ways to improve website speed. For Page caching, the Magento’s extensions i.e. Zoom Full-Page Cache, Full Page Cache Pro, Brim’s Full Page Cache can be integrated with the website for improving the speed.
6. Have a Flat Catalog
Magento uses EAV model for storing the product and customer data. And, for the same, enabling flat catalog for categories and products merges the product data into one table. This reduces the response time to MYSQL queries and therefore, improves the overall speed of the website to a great extent. Flat Catalog is very beneficial for the e-commerce stores having more than 1000 products.
7. Optimize the VPS for the Magento
If the store is running on VPS or a dedicated server, the server software and the database needs to be optimized too. One can configure NGINX, Apache, Varnish, HHVM, php-fpm, Redis, Memcache. Below are the possible solutions for Magento performance tuning:
o Varnish + NGINX + HHVM + Redis
o PHP7 with Magento 2 or PHP7 + Inchoo patch with Magento 1.x
o Use MySQL master-slave replication for separate reads and writes
o Host webserver and database on different servers
8. Audit the Code
One of the reasons for the slow performance of the websites is the PHP code and the template files. So, it is important to check the code and identify the parts that slow down the site. Magento comes with a built-in profiler but there are many third-party profilers which can be used to audit the code.
9. GZIP Compression to Shrink Page Size
It is important to take off the load from the browser and enabling GZIP compression on the server-side can help in achieving the same. It compresses the HTML page so that there are fewer kilobytes for the browser to download.
10. Remove Render-Blocking CSS and Javascript
One must keep in mind that only JS and CSS need to display above-the-fold content which should be put in between the head tags. And, it is viewed that lesser the time browser spends on parsingsection of the webpage, the better it is. So, going through the CSS files and identifying and implementing the rules that are applicable to the visible content will be a good practice to improve the overall speed of Magento store. There are many extensions also available to remove render-block javascript.
These are just a few tips apart from the regular optimization practices which will help in improving the Magento store’s speed to a great level. All these optimizations can also be done using individual plugins as well to optimize the website in this booming online marketing.
