If you have a Magento e-commerce store, you already know the importance of performance and speed for a good shopping experience. The loading speed and smooth performance is key to satisfactory browsing and shopping experience. Performance and speed is important for an e-commerce store from many angles. Slow speed and sloth performance also have detrimental effects on the search engine rank of a website.
It has been found that the attention span of online audiences is steadily decreasing and most online customers just move to a different store with the slightest delay in page loading or because of the delayed responses to their commands. For mobile users, the speed and performance are more important since while accessing an online store on their small handheld device screen they tend to have difficulties concentrating longer. While browsing a store on the go, the slower loading speed and performance glitches are likely to add to the frustration even more. So, every e-commerce store now looks forward to means, measures, and tools to optimize their store performance for mobile users.
Since Magento is embraced as a richly featured and dynamic content management platform for e-commerce stores and business websites across the niches, opting for further performance optimization is so important. Page loading speed is regarded to be a silent killer of online revenue for many e-commerce stores across the niches. It has been studied that 42% of online customers or visitors will leave a web store that is slow enough to load in more than 3 seconds. Slower the page speed becomes, the bigger the rate of abandonment is experienced by the e-commerce customers.
Now that we have explained the importance of boosting Magento performance for e-commerce stores, let us explain the key ways to carry out this optimization.
Getting The Right Hosting On-Board
For faster performance and loading speed, the single most important step is to get the right hosting provider for your web store. You need to choose the hosting service that ensures optimum reliability and a smooth user experience resulting in improved customer engagement and business conversion.
While shared hosting is the cheaper option for any website or web store, it has a lot of downsides in terms of performance and speed. Instead of choosing shared hosting, opt for either dedicated hosting or cloud hosting platforms such as Cloudways. Some cloud hosting platforms like Cloudways also provides a fully-featured and managed Magento cloud hosting service. With such powerful hosting solutions, you not only get optimum performance but also an array of enhancement options that come as part of the solution.
Get Latest Magento Update
Magento comes with regular updates with each subsequent version optimized with enhanced security features and better performance attributes. This is why for Magento store optimization it is important to get the latest Magento version update. By updating your Magento store to the latest version of the software, sometimes you can solve many of the common security glitches and performance issues.
Are you still using already backdated Magento 1 for your e-commerce store or business website? Well, the majority of your performance issues and speed problems can just be solved by upgrading to the Magento 2. By upgrading to Magento 2 you can simply make your Magento e-commerce stores more secure, fast-paced, and trustworthy.
Continue With The Indexer Updates
Magento is one of the leading CMS systems that allow the business websites and e-commerce stores to work with the bulk volumes of data while over time this may affect the loading time. To address this problem Magento always reindexes the indexers to reduce the load of updating indexes on every object. But an expert Magento development company is aware of the limitations of this process and so it is advisable for the developers to update the indexers manually.
By manually updating the indexers from time to time one can easily boost the loading time and overall performance. The developers of Magento 1 websites can update the indexers from the admin panel. For the stores and websites running on Magento 2, they need to execute a particular CLI command on the root directory: PHP bin/Magento indexer:reindex
Monitor All Third-Party Extensions and Pages
Another good practice to optimize Magento store performance is to optimize the third-party extensions that are used by the store. To do this, switch off each extension at a time followed by clearing the cache and evaluate the impact on the web-store performance.
Apart from inspecting the extensions, it is also important to monitor the performance of all the essential CMS pages including the homepage, category page, product page, and checkout page. Once you could experience a better website performance after disabling any of these modules, you have detected the responsible extension or problem with a page.
Use The Flat Catalogs
In Magento stores, the entire store information is basically saved through a Magento database much like Microsoft Excel. As soon as the data limits of this database reach their optimum level, the excess data is spilled over resulting in the slowdown of the store.
To overcome this issue of spilled data through Magento Flat Catalog Category and Flat Catalog Product, you can easily boost the performance of the Magento store.
Compressing CSS and JavaScript Files
Compressing the CSS and JavaScript files and merging them can reduce the footprint of the web pages and make them lightweight. This can boost the loading speed dramatically since the browser now will send fewer requests. This will also reduce the individual file size resulting in a positive impact on the website performance.
Boost The Search Function
In e-commerce stores, the visitors mostly consider a smooth search function with faster search results as a key determinant for the website performance. Some third-party search tools are efficient enough to allow fast-paced search functions as they run the indexing service on the servers so that the entire database doesn’t need to be searched. This results in a more precision-driven and fast-paced search function resulting in enhanced user experience.
Using a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
To optimize the website speed Content Delivery Network (CDN) is used all over the world by leading websites. The CDN service helps to cache the static content of a Magento website such as the images, JavaScript and CSS files, fonts, etc. This helps quickly loading the pages by using cached data from the nearest server.
CDN service stores the cached data of the website across multiple server locations around the world and as per the user location, the cached data is accessed from the nearest server to ensure faster loading speed in the browser of the user. To optimize the performance and speed of your Magento store, it is advisable to configure the best CDN service with the store.
Conclusion
All the above-mentioned practices and measures have withstood the test of time since many Magento websites and e-commerce stores have been benefited through them. For your Magento web store also, these performance optimization measures will stand effective.
