Magento Performance Optimization Tips and Tricks

Magento is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms and powers over 80 percent of the online stores. For online stores, page loading speeds are very important. This is because a customer does not wait for more than 3 seconds for a page to load. If your website takes longer than that, your bounce rates will definitely be high. Well, for this reason, Magento Performance Optimization is of utmost importance. It is one way to maintain customer satisfaction.

Firstly, let’s take a look at what causes poor performance in websites. The main reason is the size of the website. Statistics show that there has been a 25% increase in the web page size. This means that businesses are incorporating a lot of content on the websites. This dramatically pulls down the loading time for the website. Thankfully, Magento has a lot of speed optimization techniques that you can implement. Performance optimization has become a necessity for eCommerce websites.

Here are some of the facts and figures that you might want to take a look at:

  • 40% of the users abandon a website if the load time is more than 3 seconds.
  • Reducing the page load times by 100 milliseconds will increase the customer conversion rates by 1%.

Well, Magento offers you with plenty of options to improve site load speeds.

Sprite Images, CSS and JS file merging to reduce HTTP requests

Sprite Images are a reliable way to improve Magento site performance. In this method, all the images are merged and combined into one single image source. This source will be placed under one single URL and requires a single HTTP request. This greatly helps speed optimization, as otherwise, each image would require one HTTP request.

Lazy Image Loading

Magento speed optimization can be achieved by Lazy image loading techniques. This means that as the user scrolls, the images load.

Performance tuning for MySQL server and enabling PHP realpath_cache

MySQL can be tuned to cache database queries and improves the web page load times. The database cache can be effectively activated by using the query_cache_size parameter. Similarly, the realpath_cache size can also be used to reduce the number of disk lookups.

Varnish and nginx

If your Magento store is heavy with content, Varnish cache is a good way to deal with poor loading speed. The reverse proxy makes page load faster as it returns results from the cached version of the pages rather than processing a new request each time.

Using PHP accelerator

PHP accelerator is the best solution for Magento site speed optimization. It is an extension that caches all the PHP scripts. Thus the scripts need not be parsed each time they are requested and website speed is improved.

Utilizing full page cache

Magento provides you with an excellent option for improving speed. Full page cache is a way in which Magento stores user behavior right from the first time he logs in. The next time the same user logs in, Magento uses this cache instead of the server to process the request. This significantly reduces Magento website load times and improves performance.

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