Magento raises the bar when it comes to high performance ecommerce platforms. It has quickly made a good following and is now a globally accepted platform for eCommerce owners. Even though it is highly popular, Magento tends to be quite heavy a CMS especially in its default settings. Only when right settings and configuration are applied, does the platform see a bump in speed. This can be quiet a task if you are a newbie developer.
There are many ways that can help increase the speed of Magento. These methods can also be applied on some other CMS systems which use PHP. So, let’s take a look at some easy to apply ways to help increase the speed of your Magento ecommerce store.
- Minify CSS and JavaScript: Make sure that the JavaScript and CSS are compressed. This can lower the downloading, execution and parsing time. Numerous online tools can be used to minify these. Few notable ones include jscompress.com, minifycss.com, csscompressor.com and more.
- Resize Images: This is a common step that will help you in multiple ways. Select a suitable image compressor and reduce the size of the image. The bandwidth between the server and the browser has to be lowered which is achieved well through image compression. Once again, there are many image compression tools available online that can help you do this such as LPEGmini.com, hkpegoptimizer.net etc.
- Enable GZIP compression:GZIP drastically reduces the number of bytes required to be sent over the network and helps increase the speed. In some cases, it can cut the size of the CSS, HTML and JavaScript files by up to 70%.
- Combine images using CSS sprites: To lower the server requests, combine the CSS sprites that lowers the number of files. Subsequently, bytes downloaded from the server can be bought down as well.
- Cache control headers – It lowers the number of HTTP requests for faster page load times.
- Apache KeepAlives–Shared web hosting can sometimes cause the browsers to close to limit the number of connections. Apache KeepAlives help increase them and maintain optimum connections between server and the browser.
- Implement opcode cache mechanism – When a page loads, every time server has to read numerous files and compile them. Magentois usually subjected to heavy ecommerce so that means it can put significant amount of load onto the server. It can be regulated better using opcode cache. Nowadays, there are opcode caches built in to codes for faster execution. Accelerator, APC and Xcache are some opcode caches for magento.
- Enable Memcache mechanism – Object caching system is a high performance, generic and distributed in nature. It manages the database load to better optimize the dynamic web applications. Simply enable this from the configuration file.
These are some of the Magento tips that can surely help you deliver a better user experience to your visitors. Search for more advanced tips to truly customize your Magento ecommerce store the way you want.
