Magento is one of the most popular platformchoices for ecommerce businesses. As an ecommerce business owner, you need to optimize your website to stay ahead of your competitors. To get better ecommerce website organic traffic and improve ROI, you need to rank for popular keywords which bring sale. Hence SEO plays an important role for the growth of an ecommerce business. Another important factor in SEO which affects the credibility of the website and the ranking of keywords is page loading speed. From the user’s perspective, a slow loading speed provides a very average user experience. You don’t want to be average, right?
Here we have compiled important speed optimization tips to speed up your Magento website and improve your website performance. Apart from the usual tips like image optimization, CSS and JavaScript optimization, let’s look at the Magento-specific tips to power your website and provide a better user experience.
- Go for the Latest Version
- Caching Management
- Flat Catalog
- Database & Logs Cleansing
- Minimize 3rd party extensions usage
- Better Hosting
Magento releases frequent updates to their software so, whether you’re using the Enterprise edition or community edition, it’s important to upgrade your website to the latest version of Magento. Every version is released with improved security checks and better features so it’s beneficial to upgrade your site to the latest version. Always have an expert work on the upgrading process as a small mistake can have a high cost.
Consider our Magento2 upgrade service if you haven’t yet upgraded
Magento has built-in caching modules that are effective to an extent to handle caches. You could also combine Memcache + APC + NGINX +Varnish caching to get better results. If you’re looking for more advanced options, then you can also choose 3rd party cache extension to manage your cache better.
Finally, make sure you have enabled all the Cache Types, you can find this at the following path: System ->Cache Management.
You should also leverage browser and page level caching. Magento 2 htaccess file comes with all the required snippets to enable browser level caching so there’s no need to worry if you’re using Magento 2. For page caching you could choose extensions like Full Page Cache to serve your webpages much faster.
Enabling the flat catalog is vital to improve the speed for large (>500 products) ecommerce websites. Magento stores product data using EAV model and enabling the flat catalog will merge product data into one table to improve the database response and hence improve the loading speed.
You can enable it in the following path: Stores ->System -> Configuration -> Catalog > Frontend
In this page change “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product” to “Yes.”
Magento stores your website logs for 180 days which makes the database very large. Clean your database logs once in every 2 weeks to eliminate unnecessary logs to clear up space. You can find it in the following path: Configuration -> Advanced ->System ->Log
In this page, change the setting under “Save Log, Days” to 14 days and save the configuration.
Remove all the unused extensions in your Magento store to improve page loading speed. Having more extensions will increase the server load and increase the number of HTTP requests which is not good for the stability and speed of your website. You could disable or delete unused extensions.
Always choose a trusted hosting provider and avoid falling in the trap of cheap hosting. Having a cheap hosting service will increase your operational cost over a period of time and decrease your website performance. Choosing a hosting provider is the first step and you need to have continuous server monitoring processes in place to optimize your server and improve the page loading speed.
We hope you have found these tips for optimizing your loading speed of your Magento site helpful. Embitel is a full-service ecommerce development firm which handles all tech aspects of an ecommerce business such as design, development, marketing and server support. Contact us to book a free consultation with our ecommerce developers.
