It goes without saying that a slow loading website will turn its customers away. Especially when it comes to an eCommerce store, you are supposed to do all you can to improve its user-experience because that’s where your customers, your ROI and your profit lies.
Now, if you are a retailer using Magento then you probably are facing issues with the site’s loading time because several retailers have complained about it too. However, you don’t have to be upset about it because there’s a solution to this problem and you can easily speed up your site without much hassle with the help of Devrims. But first it’s important to know why Magento is slow in the first place?
The Reason Behind Slow Loading Magento Websites
Magento isn’t slow by default, in fact, there are other certain factors that lead to a slow loading website. Starting with;
- Using slow or inadequate hardware
- Not using the right plugins
- Not meeting the system’s requirement to run Magento
- Inappropriate customization
- Not optimizing PHP, NGINX or the MySQL configuration
These are some common reasons why your Magento store is slow but again, there’s a lot you can do to avoid it,like, opting for Managed Magento Hosting.
Most Effective Ways To Speed Up Your Magento Store
1-Regularly Updating Magento
You are supposed to update your Magento version whenever there’s a new release. With new releases come performance improvements and different patches that can help improve your site’s user experience. In simpler words, you should always run your store on the latest Magento version.
2-Make Sure To Install CDN (Content Delivery Network)
For those who don’t know, CDN or Content Delivery Network is more of a program that allows you to store your files and pages. The reason why this installation is important is that CDN can work wonders for your site’s loading speed. Upon setting up CDN for your Magento store, your users will start receiving CSS files, Javascript and images faster. What’s best is that Magento already supports CDN so you don’t have to worry about installing any third party extensions.
Here’s how you can do it;
- Go to the Magento Admin panel and then click on “Settings”
- In the “Settings” you’ll see the option of “Configuration”
- Expand the “General” tab and then click on “Web”
- Head to the “Base URLs” and then configure the details accordingly
3-Enabling Varnish Cache
In order to speed up your eCommerce store, you first need to minimize the server load. This is where caching can really come in handy to you. Enabling varnish cache will improve your site’s speed to a whole other level. It’ll reduce the response time and the network bandwidth consumption for all the future requests. Here’s what you need to do to enable it on your store;
- Go to the “Admin” panel then click on “Systems” and then click on “Tools”. There you’ll see the “Cache management” option.
- Now select all the fields and then click on “Submit”.
4-Use Magento Log Cleaning
One of the most common reasons why retailers struggle with their Magento’s site speed is the Magento log. The log slows down the database backup and it affects the entire store too. Now to solve this issue all you have to do is to clean the log on a regular basis in order to improve the site’s speed and performance.
- Go to the “Systems”
- Under “Systems”, you’ll see “MySQL Message Queue Cleanup”
- Now change all the values as per your requirements or set them as default
- New Messages Lifetime
- Retry Messages in Progress After
- Successful Messages Lifetime
- Failed Messages Lifetime
- Once done, you then have to click on “Save Config”.
5-Minimizing The Javascript And CSS
To speed up your site and improve its overall performance, what you can do is that you can merge Javascript and the CSS files instead of keeping them separate. The merge won’t take much time and it’s a simple process;
- Head to the “Advanced Settings”
- Under it, you’ll see the option of “Developer”. Click on it
- Go to the “Javascript Settings” section and then change the values of these 3 fields to “yes”
- Minify Javascript files
- Merge Javascript files
- Enable Javascript Bundling
- Now go to the “CSS” settings tab and change the fields “Merge CSS files” and “Minify CSS files” to “Yes”.
6- Eliminate All Decelerating Extensions
For speed optimization of your Magento store, the first thing you need to do is to perform an extension audit. These extensions often interfere with one another and that’s what leads to a slow website. We know how important these extensions are and your store probably won’t work without them. However, it’s all on you and you have to find the ones that’ll work without any hitch. Just make sure to reduce the number of custom modules so that your site’s speed isn’t compromised. Test the extensions one by one by turning them off and on. This will help you identify those that are affecting your store’s speed.
7-Setting The Operating Mode To Optimize Your Store’s Speed
The wrong operation mode often ends up affecting the site’s performance to a whole other level. Especially if you have moved from Magento 1 to Magento 2, chances are that you’ve overlooked the operation mode. What you should know is that Magento 2 can work in developer, production and default mode. The default and developer modes are designed specifically for debugging and development whereas the production mode has the highest speed. You shouldn’t overlook these details because they are the main reason why your Magento store is slow right now.
8-Optimizing Content
Mostly the downloaded content affects the site’s speed and performance. In order to improve the speed of your site, you need to optimize your images and get rid of all the outdated content that you and your website no longer need. Especially work on optimizing the visual content of your store because that’s where all the load lies. Reduce this load and you’ll see a visible change in your site’s loading time.
Conclusion
These are some of the most effective tips one can use to speed up his Magento store. You need to implement these tips right away because a slow loading Magento site will always have a high bounce rate and that won’t be good for your business. If you don’t want to lose your potential customers just because your site is slow then do all you can to optimize its speed and make sure that your store’s user experience is above par because that’s exactly what Google’s search engine and your users want.