Top 10 Way to Improve the Loading Speed of Magento Website

Magento, one of the most popular eCommerce platforms in recent times, is being used by a lot of upcoming and established businesses to create a name for themselves in the online marketing domain. Ever since its first release in 2008, Magento has slowly and steadily evolved as a robust content management system (CMS) which comes with many features and highly customizable options. The online stores can be easily scaled as and when required and this is one of the prominent reasons for Magento website being preferred over other available options.

The speed of a Magento website plays a significant role in not only offering a seamless experience to users but also improving the rank of the store on the search engine’s result page. Let’s have a look at some of the top strategies which can be considered during Magento Web development and in later stages to improve the loading speed of Magento website.

1. Latest Version

It is very important to always make sure that we are using the latest version of Magento. Newer versions come with bug fixes to the previously released versions and also have significant performance improvements associated with them. Magento informs us of any important updates in the form of notifications or messages to our inbox depending on the version of Magento being used.

2. Content Delivery Network

Implementation of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for our Magento based online stores ensures that users are served components like product image, JavaScript, and CSS from multiple locations across the globe and hence the content is delivered at a relatively faster rate. It is one of the easiest ways to decrease the website loading time instantly.

3. Cache Management

We can use the built-in caching mechanism of Magento or utilize different third-party solutions, which seem to achieve better results in improving the performance of our online store. We need to ensure that all Cache Types are enabled at System -> Cache Management. We can also make effective use of Browser Caching by adding necessary caching related code snippets to the .htaccess file. We can also use Page Caching to further improve Magento website speed.

4. Enable the Flat Catalog

The EAV (entity attribute value) model used by Magento to store the data of customer and products. Upon enabling flat catalog, categories and products data are merged into a single table thereby improving the performance of MySQL queries. We need to navigate to Stores -> Configuration -> Catalog and under the Storefront section and set the value corresponding to ‘Use Flat Catalog Category’ and ‘Use Flat Catalog Product’ to ‘Yes’ and then clear the cache.

5. Image Optimization for Magento Website

On an average, images make up more than 56% of the total content weight of a website. Giving proper emphasis to optimizing the images on our website can drastically improve its loading speed as it decreases their download time. We can make use of various image editing tools and extensions available to compress these images.

6. Merge CSS and JS files

We can merge our CSS and JavaScript files in Magento into a single file. This reduces the count of HTTP requests on our page and ultimately speeds up the loading of our website. We need to go to System -> Advanced -> Developer and under the ‘JavaScript Settings’ and ‘CSS Settings’ set the drop-down values to ‘Yes’ and save these changes.

7. Enable Magento Compilation

The compilation feature offered by Magento offers a performance boost of close to 50% in terms of the website loading speed. Whenever a website loads, the system reads through the files in a particular way which leads to a lot of reads. The Magento compiler reduces this load by compiling the files into a single directory and all caching the files which are frequently required.

8. Clean up Logs

Magento stores logs for 180 days which can lead to database growing quite large. We can update this value to a lesser number, say 14 days. We need to navigate to Stores -> Configuration -> Advanced -> System -> Log and under the ‘Save Log, Days’ set a preferred value. Log tables in the database can also be cleared by manually deleting the data in the log tables.

9. Fewer Extensions and Modules

Like any other platform, we can also have performance issues with our Magento website if there a lot of extensions present. Extensions not only increase the number of HTTP requests but also requires loading of additional CSS and JavaScript files which has a significant impact on the load speed of our website. We can disable the modules that we do not require at Stores -> Configuration -> Advanced -> Advanced.

10. Update Indexes

Magento updates the index of data objects by default, but in some case, we might need to update them manually so as to improve the performance of SQL queries. We need to navigate to System -> Index Management and select the objects corresponding to which we desire to update the index.

These are some of the points which must be taken into account to improve Magento website speed. All the aforementioned points can be applied to any Magento based eCommerce online store, irrespective of the products they deal in, as these are platform specific changes. Since the loading speed of a website plays a critical role in determining the future of our business, we must make sure that take necessary steps as and when required so that the performance of our website is never compromised.