The product and the price range over your Magento store might give you an edge, but if the loading speed fails to stand at the customer’s expectation, customers’ will probably shift to another platform.
With no dearth of alternatives, an eCommerce site making $100,000/day would be losing $2.5 million in a year if the page loading time exceeds 1 second more than the optimal speed.
Surprised right? But with the world moving at a fast pace, people’s attention span is decreasing.
Traditionally, people would love to spend hours shopping physically, but today for eCommerce platform benchmarks like Magento, which offers hoards of features, scalability, flexibility, and reliability people do not want to wait more than 3 seconds for the page to load.
The cause for poor loading…
In the race of increasing functionalities and features, the web page size is increasing by 25% each year. One needs to implement extensive techniques to optimize the speed of Magento store and thus it has become a necessity now, instead of a luxury.
This primarily happens due to multiple HTTPs requests, failure to send cache and more.
How would you achieve the optimal loading time for the Magento store?
Since the scenario and the necessity quite contradict the above failure, let’s go through some of the techniques which will boost up the Magento’s store performance.
Limit The Extensions and Modules:
Remember, more the number of extensions on your store, more would be the HTTP requests that you would be sending.
We know you would now be reminded of the neat module installed a year ago but never used!
The extension which is still present in the system is going to impact the store performance and squirm the performance.
You need to remove the extension in the first place rather than disabling it from Magento. Thus only install minimum and necessary modules so that you do not have to perform the additional task of disabling and removing the extensions later.
You can write below command for the extension you want to get rid of in the SSH.
php bin/magento module:disable Elsnerextension1 --clear-static-content php bin/magento setup:upgrade cd app/code/Elsnerextension1/ rm -rf Elsnerextension1
Here, elsnerextension1 is just for reference we have given.
Opt for a faster DNS:
Did you know, the new DNS service introduced by Cloudfare is 28% faster and more secure than the Google and CISCO DNS
You can download the extension and install it in your Magento marketplace to enjoy the faster resolution speed.
You can even Hire Magento developer and include the extension in your store.
Developer mode optimization:
You can weave the best shopping experience by just making small tweaks in the developer mode itself.
For this, activate the developer mode by writing the following command:
php bin/magento deploy:mode:set developer
Now switch on to Stores>>Configuration>>Advanced>>Developer. Once the developer mode is open, go to Javascript settings.
Ensure that Merge Javascript files and enable javascript bundling are turned off. Only the Minify javascript file has to be on.
You can now check if the CSS merge and CSS minify are on. If not, go to the CSS settings and turn them on.
After that type,
php bin/magento deploy:mode:set production
To check if it is in the production mode type,
php bin/magento deploy:mode:show
and it should result in the following output.
Current application mode: production.
Deploying Varnish Caching:
Speed optimization can be done in many ways in the form of caching. Magento has an inbuilt caching module along with the third-party module installation.
It is the best thing if you have a varnish cache on the website content. This will decrease the server load while loading multiple pages.
If your Magento 2 store has a lot of traffic, caching almost becomes imperative to avoid the downtime of the site.
Varnish cache performs the reverse proxy and refreshes the speed of the landing pages. It will reduce the creation of a new request every time when the site loads.
If convinced, go to the Stores>>Configuration>>Advanced>> system and turn on the varnish cache now. Save the configuration once the changes are applied.
A faster eCommerce store definitely gets a faster conversion rate than a slow speed website. You can avail the best results by combining NGINX + APC +Memcache+Varnish caching.
Enable Flat Catalog:
Once you enable the flat catalog, it allows you to merge the product categories and data into a single table. If your Magento store is highly popular, then we would suggest this practice to be implemented at the earliest.
It is indeed very beneficial for a greater database.
You can go to Stores>>Configuration>> Catalog and under this, change the Use Flat catalog product and Use flat catalog category to Yes.
Save the changes and clear the cache from /var/cache directory.
You can also select the option of Flush cache storage from the System>>cache management and remove everything.
Concluding Thoughts
Some other optimization tips:
- Image optimization;
- Merging CSS and Javascript files;
- Enabling Magento compilation;
- MySQL configuration;
- Update indexes and more.
With so many other options available, we advise you to hire Magento 2 developer and avail the best possible benefits at a go. Since Google has started penalizing websites with slow speed, it is important to upgrade the Magento for better performance.
Incorporate the above suggestions, we guarantee that you will have a substantial reduction in the page loading time and see a clear improvement.
Thanks