Top 10 Ways to Maximize Magento Website Speed

According to Speedtest.net rankings, the average global internet speed is 27.69 Mbps for mobile and 63.85 Mbps for fixed broadband speeds. Internet connectivity is getting faster and faster and now reaches a wider audience with every passing day.

Website visitors expect quick, responsive websites with tons of features. And when they see sluggish, poor performance, it’s an instant turn-off. Slow site speeds are also a turn-off for Google who takes site performance into account for ranking search results.

A slow site can spell disaster for your online store.

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Slow site = sinking conversion rate

Your customers notice the small things. A small lag or weird bug can lead to cart abandonment, sinking conversion rates, and could harm customer loyalty.

Google enforces strict standards for mobile and desktop sites. Slow loading times get in the Google crawler’s way, which may mean some of your pages won’t be indexed. In July 2018, Google rolled out an update that aimed to incentivize higher rankings for faster mobile pages. Higher rankings = more conversions.

Why your Magento site is slow?

As a Magento store owner, you’ve likely had feedback about pages taking too long to load. Or maybe you checked your site’s performance on Google’s PageSpeed Insights or TestMySite and were shocked to find just how low the score was.

Bottlenecks are the #1 reason your site is slow.

They include:

• Too much JavaScript
• Lots of images
• Not enough hardware resources
• Slow hosting provider
• Unoptimized database
• Poorly-written code

So what can you do to improve performance?

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10 best ways to maximize Magento website speed

Magento websites, like any e-Commerce website, have a lot of moving parts. With all the site elements, features, extensions, and everything in-between, a small lag can snowball, leading to serious problems.

Here’s what you can do to optimize Magento performance right now.

1. Get a better host

Invest in a virtual private server hosting. VPS, dedicated, and cloud servers are more stable, and they can handle server requests lightning fast. Getting the right balance of resources (CPU, RAM) can be tricky, so you might need to tinker with the settings. Get top hosting providers for Magento here!

2. Get Magento 2 ASAP

Are you still running Magento 1? Are you still running Magento 1 on a slow server? If you are, it’s time to invest in Magento migration. Magento 2 is superior in every way, and support for Magento 1 will end in June 2020.

Consolidated server response times for all steps of the checkout process show that Guest checkout mode are up to 51% faster and Customer Checkouts are up to 35% faster on Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 when compared to Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.2.

You can read more about the difference in the performance of Magento 2 vs Magento 1 by reading Magento’s white paper on Site Performance and Scalability Optimizations.

3. Upgrade to the latest version (of everything)

The difference between Magento 1 and Magento 2 performance is astronomical. The same goes for every other technology you have, whether it’s the webserver (nginx, Apache) programming language (PHP, JS), or other features like Magento extensions.

Developers work hard to make their software secure and reliable. Don’t miss out on a big performance boost, update everything today.

4. Get your site audited by professionals

Sometimes no matter how much you tweak your site, you still can’t get the performance you want. A trained eye can replace 1000 untrained eyes.

Magento sites are prone to having too many server requests, heavy page weight, lazy page elements and images, lots of third party extensions, and poorly written or unoptimized code.

A professional site audit can identify deep technical issues and solve them to maximize Magento performance.

5. Get rid of Magento bloat

Magento comes pre-installed with a lot of features, many of which you don’t need. Disable core modules and features you don’t use.

Modules you can disable include:

• Extra languages
• Offline shipment and payments
• Backup, Captcha, Persistent, RSS
• MSRP, Send Friend, Weee
• Multi-shipping, Checkout agreements
• Product types
• And others, depending on your store

Disable unnecessary features like:

• Reports from observers
• Event reports
• Plugins
• Layout elements

Reports are generated for various user actions like adding products to cart, viewing certain products, etc. You can speed up Magento 2 simply by disabling these reports as well as any plugins or layout elements you don’t need.

6. Invest in a CDN

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is one of the best ways to instantly improve performance. It allows visitors from anywhere in the world to have a similar experience on your site. CDNs deliver media, images, and JS/CSS files much faster thanks to distributed servers.

7. Optimize your database

Databases store data in one location. Site visitors press a button and a request is sent to the server, which then responds with an answer.

A poorly optimized database is a disjointed mess and the server will take much longer to serve requests. The result will be reflected in performance.

Without a technical background, you’ll likely end up frustrated trying to optimize your database. A site audit is the best course of action.

8. Turn on caching

Magento recommends turning on all the caches from the System > Tools > Cache Management page. They also highly recommend using Varnish Cache — an open-source web application accelerator that reduces server response time and bandwidth usage.

9. Follow Magento Performance Best Practices

One of the best resources for improving page speed. It includes recommendations and best practices, and it’s easy to follow for novices.

Here’s just one on the tips offered by Magento (click here to access the full version):

Go to Stores-> Configuration-> Advanced-> Developer and change the values to those shown in the table below:

10. Optimize JS and CSS

Shipping too much JavaScript and CSS can severely impact loading times. The latest version of Magento — 2.3.2— includes a JS optimization you can turn on to load JS files after the main content is loaded. Minifying helps, but sometimes there’s no other choice than optimizing or rewriting code.

Takeaways-Turn to professionals to guarantee high performance

There’s only so much you can do to tweak your site without technical expertise. The 10 best tips to speed up Magento stores outlined above are just the tip of the iceberg. Poor site performance can range from a simple bottleneck like scripts loading slowly to something more complex like an extension that is hogging resources.

Without intimate knowledge of Magento, you might get stuck. This is where Magento professionals are invaluable. Experience trumps enthusiasm in most cases, so looks for experienced developers to help you with this process. At Mageplaza, our developers will analyze your website, identify weak areas, and suggest possible solutions to boost your website speed.

Don’t hesitate to contact us now for free consultations!

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Related post: 16 Steps to Speed Up Your Magento 2 Store