What is the loading speed of your website? Should it be faster? Website speed is a popular point of conversation nowadays and for very good reasons. Achieving a good Google rank is in vain if your site speed is stopping you get business by converting visitors to customers. If you haven’t been evaluating your website speed, today is the time to start because the website performance is one of the biggest concern for every business website owner.
Slow running websites results in a higher bounce rate wherein the user leave the site very frequently, also there are very few return visits. Unhappy users not only lead to revenue loss but also damage in reputation. Search engines like Google take site speed into account when determining search rankings, directly affecting your position in the world. With the increased outreach of the website through mobiles, low-performance websites giving low-quality user experience will be let down very soon. Constant and never-ending improvement of virtually every aspect of website is very important & speed is an inevitable parameter for the same.
Magento is leading eCommerce platform and there are more than 500,000 web-store currently built using Magento. Based on the rich eCommerce functionality provided by Magento, the customer expects that the speed offered by its default configuration should be high. In addition to the default features, Magento offers spontaneous organization interfaces & frameworks which facilitate robust marketing, search engine optimization and website improvement tools giving the merchants, ability to customize websites according to their unique business requirements. While developing your Magento websites, there are many things which you can do to ensure that the overall speed of the site is optimized and you have upper hand comparatively to other players.
Following are the necessary steps you can take to improve the page load timing & in turn the overall performance of your Magento website:
Utilize a Faster Web Server
Your web server is home of your website. If your server is moderate, your site will be moderate. As your ecommerce grows there will be an increase in the number of products, visitors, increased hits & overall revenue transactions taking place on the website. In order to facilitate the exponential growth, you should use a server which has the optimum capacity to bear the load for e.g. Amazon cloud is one of the popular server used by most of the successful ecommerce ventures due to its ability to scale up based on business needs, flexibility, & high standards of security. To ensure the configuration of your server check-on the various parameters affecting the performance of your hosting server like: RAM, Drive storage, CPU speed & so on. It is highly advisable to set up an email alert to notify during the unforeseen circumstances like: peak traffic times the excess load, website down and similar other issues.
Utilise a Content Delivery Network
Content delivery is a system of web servers distributed over various geography that empowers websites to load faster. If for example, your website is hosted in one country and a person is trying to access it in a different country, that person has to wait for the data to travel thousands of miles. But that is not the case with a Content Delivery network, whereby the information is delivered quickly as it is fetched from the nearest web server. For e.g. If the website is USA based, data server is in the USA, but if this site utilizes the CDN and there is someone trying to access the website from India, then instead of fetching the data right from USA, the information can be fetched from the nearest server, say the one located in Singapore centre.
Minimize Redirects
Sometimes diverting a user, starting with one URL then moving onto the next is essential. While a few redirects won’t bring about the inconvenience, but if you have an excess of them, it will do more bad than good. Every time you divert a client it triggers an additional HTTP request, resulting in impeding website performance. It is advised to minimize the number of redirects and utilize them only when necessary.
Clean Up Your Code
There is wide range of approaches to code a website page to get the desired visual result. As a rule, an ineffectively coded website page will end up having a striking resemblance to the coding page itself. It’s the execution of those website pages that should differ remarkably. Utilizing clean, moderate code makes your documents smaller and increase the stacking speed for every page. Content management systems usually make bloated code, so despite the fact that your site is easy to manage; you’re diminishing the capability of having an extraordinary site loading speed.
Optimize Images
If your website is slow, your images may be at fault. Image files can be of larger size & sometimes can affect the website without your direct knowledge. Using attractive visuals is a popular trend in websites designing, yet you should be particular with what you include on your website. Ensure you’re utilizing the right kind of image, and always adjust your image displays. Optimizing your images reduces the overall size and serves the actual purpose.
Merge CSS and JS files
Combining CSS and JS files is a simple yet successful approach to improving the speed of your website. There are different CSS and JavaScript files on a website and if you combine these files, then the site needs to load only one CSS and JS file. This will make every page load faster.
Delete unused extensions
Deleting unused extensions is one of the ideal approaches to accelerate your Magento site. It is advisable to remove the unused extensions rather than simply disabling them. Because when you disable an extension, it still exists in the database increasing the size of your database (DB). So, if you do not require any extension, it is advisable to remove it completely.
Enable Flat Catalog
Magento utilizes the EAV database module to store all of the information associated with customers as well as the product. This implies that each category or product has information spread all through many tables. Empowering the Flat Catalog enhances the execution of your site as it permits Magento website to build the same objects with a single DB query from one single DB table. All online stores should enable Flat Catalog for Categories and for the stores with over a thousand products, it is advisable to empower Flat Catalog for Products as well.
Difference between bad, good and great website is only a few seconds. It has become compulsory for online retailers, who are presently using a Magento powered shopping website, to upgrade execution as well as the speed of their online store. While hiring certified Magento developers it is important that you audit your website and plan strategy to significantly upgrade the same.
