Do you know that Magento 2 was actually built to serve tons of users at a time? The store is lightweight but one shouldn’t use it without proper optimization. Otherwise, it can become a pain to really use and an overwhelming eyesore to even look at! A slow Magento 2 store can really be a bad experience. One of the worst things that a modern user doesn’t want is wasting time. Wastage of time leads to frustration and fewer sales. The frustration is similar to how we feel it when our Charter Spectrum Internet is slow. Just like a contemporary user hates lagging internet speeds, same is the case with any website, software, and store speed.
Moreover, Google clearly discriminates between the slow and fast websites. A slow Magento 2 is bad for Search Engine Optimization too. When a store is taking its good sweet time to fully load, Google is sure to notice it. And then, it will rank it lower than your competitor stores. This means fewer people will end up finding your store online. Let us help you make your Magento 2 store snappy to use and noticeably fast.
Speed Up Your Magento 2 Store with These 8 Useful Tips
Magento is famous for performance and speed issues. A user tries to make sure that their e-commerce solution is fast. The speed is one of the most significant factors when it comes to SEO rankings, sales, abandonment rate, and the overall shopping and user experience. According to Kissmetrics, if a site is earning $100,000 a day, a delay of even one second can cause a potential loss of $2.5 million every year. That’s a lot! Read the following tips to improve the speed noticeably:
- Get the Latest Version
- Implement a Content Delivery Network
- Utilize Browser Caching
- Utilize Caching
- Enabling Flat Catalog
- Page Caching
- Cleaning Up Magento Logs and Database
- Enabling Magento Compilation
Let’s elaborate on them.
Get the Latest Version
Consider it a rule of thumb to have the latest version of every software and store that you use. To experience the best performance and speed, you need to get your hands on the latest version. Updates include performance improvements and bug fixes. So, update your Magento to Magento 2 if you haven’t already. Following are the main steps of Magento upgrade:
- Install the fresh version from the Magento file tree
- Simply run the installer using the file tree on the top and upgrade the database
- You have the option to move the custom extensions and themes from the older version to the recent version
Implement a Content Delivery Network
It is a wise idea to implement CDN or Content Delivery Network with Magento. It is one of the most effective and easiest hacks to instantly decrease load times. When you decide to do this, you are ensuring to serve your assets such as JavaScript, product images, CSS, and so on. You are making them better from multiple locations across the globe. This means you are ensuring quick delivery of your services or products to your shoppers.
Utilize Browser Caching
Browser caching is a form of catching. You can cleverly leverage it to experience better speed. You can add various snippets. For instance, you can enable Gzip compression or you can add expire headers. With Magento 2, the shipping is with a .htacess file. You can achieve the same goal with it.
Utilize Caching
Just like browser caching, you can implement various other forms of caching with Magento. Many people have experienced success by combining APC + NGINX + Varnish caching + Memcache. Magento 2 comes with a built-in, convenient caching module. However, third-party solutions seem to yield better results.
Enabling Flat Catalog
Generally, Magento 2 uses the Entity Attribute Value (EAV) model to store and save product and customer data. You can enable the flat catalog for products and categories and merge all the product data conveniently into a single table. It improves the performance by quickly responding to the MySQL queries. If you own an e-commerce store for above 1000 products, this can be really beneficial.
Page Caching
It is another very powerful way to speed up Magento 2. Page caching can take the load off the web server. It does it by serving pages, which are visited already from the cache. Hence, Magento 2 runs a lot faster. Of all the extensions available for page caching in Magento 2, we recommend the following:
- Full Page Cache Pro
- Zoom Full-Page Cache
- Brim’s Full Page Cache
Cleaning Up Magento 2 Logs and Database
The default setting of Magento 2 keeps the logs up to around 180 days. Resultantly, your database grows quite large. But the good news is that you can change these settings. Change it to a smaller time frame like a couple of weeks (14 days). You can save an enormous amount of space like this.
Enabling Magento Compilation
With Magento 2, you get a compilation feature that can give it a performance boost up to as much as 50%. The default settings in Magento 2 makes the search process of app files in a particular order. And that remains the same for every time any page loads. This results in many reads of the filesystem. The compiler helps in reducing the reads as it copies all the files in a single directory. It also caches the ones, which they use frequently. Just like your Spectrum TV adds Spectrum HBO in the list of favorite channels by default because you watch it more frequently!