Magento Performance Optimization: 10 Practical Tips

Optimizing the speed of your Magento site is a very important development factor. There are several reasons for this, and the most important one is that speed allows your customers to have the best experience when shopping in your online store. That is why we have prepared for you 10 tips for optimizing the speed of Magento. Or you can always hire dedicated Magento developer to make your task performance simpler.

Another important factor for optimizing Magento performance is ranking in Google, which has website load speed as one of the ranking factors. Earlier, we wrote about Google search engine ranking factors.

In order to evaluate the performance of your site using basic online tools, you can use https://elogic.co/.

1. Hosting for the site

Choose a server that can handle the load of traffic and the system itself. If you reach the performance limit of the server (100% CPU usage), you need to change the server. Add both CPU and RAM capacity. Use a server that is geographically close to your target audience.

2. Server and caching

Use GZIP compression, and enable caching on the user side (in the browser). Store heavy data (images, videos) in multiple locations using a CDN. This ensures that your users will get the content faster without burdening the main server. Also, you can use a web application gas pedal (better known as HTTP caching with a proxy server). This can speed up your Magento store by 80%.

3. Code optimization

Remove unnecessary PHP or Apache modules (if installed on the server) that you don’t use. Examine and identify unnecessary on both the frontend and backend. To do this, you will need access not only to the admin panel of the store but also to the server.

4. Use a PHP gas pedal

Using a PHP gas pedal is another form of caching. They improve the performance of PHP scripts by caching and using files in a compiled state. You can use PHP gas pedals. Here are the most popular ones:

o   APC – http://pecl.php.net/package/APC (For PHP 5.5 and under)

o   Xcache – http://xcache.lighttpd.net/

o   eAccelerator – http://eaccelerator.net/

5. Database Optimization

Improve database performance with query indexing and broad optimization scripts. It is better to store user sessions in files, as this significantly reduces the load on the site. Also, it is not unreasonable to change the parameters of my.cnf. Optimal are considered to be:

• query_cache_type = 1
• query_cache_size = 32M
• query_cache_limit=2M

5. Magento upgrade and maintenance

Always update to the latest version of Magento. Not only will you get more features and fewer bugs, but the site will also be more secure from attackers.

7. Image optimization

Make sure that the content and most of all images are optimized. You can use both online image compressors (such as TinyPNG) and optimize images before uploading them to the site. Make sure that all of your images and template files are optimized as well. It’s not unreasonable to minimize your CSS and sprites. You can also use extensions for Magento:

– Compress JPEG & PNG images (free). Online service module TinyPNG.

– JS & CSS Compressor + Image Optimization ($149)

8. Magento Configuration

Remove any extensions that you don’t actually use. To do this, go to the admin panel: System -> Configuration -> Advanced ->Advanced. Also, you should enable the internal system cache: System -> Cache Management.

9. Automatic scaling

These days, some hosting companies offer automatic scaling capacity. The server itself allocates capacity for the site, when in fact they are needed. Server resources are scaled up and down according to real-time traffic conditions. So if, for example, you have more traffic during the holiday season, autoscaling will add more servers to handle the traffic, when you have less traffic, it will reduce the number of servers accordingly.

10. Merge Javascript files

Using advanced configurations in Magento, you can merge JavaScript and CSS files. This will significantly reduce the loading time, as it is easier and faster to load 1 file instead of numerous JS and CSS files. Note that merging Java scripts may cause problems that need to be solved later on, but in the end, it definitely needs to be done.