Ten tips for a faster Magento web store – and more sales!
If the wait is too long in your store, your customers will just run away. And that also applies to your Magento web store. But there are other reasons why a fast web store is important, and we will list them for you. In addition, we will give you 10 tips that will help your Magento web store run much faster in no time!
A faster Magento web store is more important than you think!
You hate it when you have to wait for hours. This is why you should not let your customers wait too long when they shop on your web store. That makes a lot of sense… But figures prove that there are other reasons why it is vital that your Magento web store runs fast.
According to our colleagues at Byte.nl, 1 second you save when your web store loads means:
- a higher conversion rate (+41%): the customer will be more tempted to buy or order something
- a lower bounce rate (-24%): more purchasing intentions
- a higher value per sale (+37%)
- a longer session (+14%)
Your Magento web store 1 second faster = more conversion, more value per sale, longer session, lower bounce rate. Check out our tips!
In addition, Google counts the load time of a website as a ranking factor, for both paid and organic search results.
Speed is thus essential. But how can you make your Magento web store faster?
1. Choose quality hosting for your Magento web store
No matter how well your website is designed – a slow web hosting provider can really spoil your day and all your efforts to optimise your website will not make any difference.
- Go for reliable hosting such as Combell’s Magento web hosting, where Magento is ready-to-use and you get many extra options, including a free domain name, free SSL certificates and free 24/7 premium support.
2. Make sure you have the latest version of Magento
This may seem an obvious tip, but many users often overlook it.
- Always install the latest version available, which includes bug fixes and performance improvements.
3. Optimise the images of your Magento web store
On average, images account for 75% of a website. If they are not optimised, they can slow down the page load speed.
- Optimise your images using the Rapido Image Optimiser extension for Magento. Once installed, all the images on your website will be optimised within 24 hours. All images you will add afterwards will be instantly optimised.
- Use CSS Image Sprites to split large images into smaller ones, which will load faster.
- Compress your images using Image Optimizer for Magento 2.
4. Merge CSS and JavaScript files in your Magento settings
By combining both sorts of files, a smaller number of files will be loaded, which will shorten the load time.
- Go to your dashboard and select the Yes option in your JavaScript Settings > Merge JavaScript Files and your CSS Settings > Merge CSS Files.
5. Search your catalog: limit the filtering options
Too many options for searching your catalog on your main category page can dramatically slow down the search feature and page load.
- Limit the number of filtering options or completely disable the filtering option.
6. Activate Flat Catalog for your Magento catalog
Magento normally uses the EAV model (entity attribute value) to save product data in many different tables. Flat Catalog compiles all these products into a single table, so that they can be read faster.
- Open your dashboard and go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Storefront. Select “Yes” for the options “use Flat Catalog Category” and “use Flat Catalog Product”. Save by clicking Save Config, and then flush the cache via System > Cache Management > Flush Cache Storage.
7. Keep a clean Magento database and logs
No need to keep useless stuff in your web store! Logs can come in handy if you e.g. need to detect problems, but oversized logs can slow down the system.
- By default, Magento stores logs for 180 days. You can change this in your dashboard: Stores > Configuration > Advanced > System > Log > Save Log. Set the value to 14 days, for instance. Save by clicking Save Config.
- Clean up your database by emptying the log tables. Go to phpMyAdmin and select all the log_% tables. From the drop-down menu, you can now select Empty, and confirm by clicking Yes when asked if you want to TRUNCATE the tables.
8. Extensions and modules for your Magento: don’t overdo things!
Ready-to-use external modules can help you save a lot of time, because you no longer need to develop certain features by yourself.
- Some modules may have a negative impact on performance. Use Magento AOE Profiler to detect performance issues on your site. Follow these instructions to install and use this extension.
- Limit the number of modules: the more modules linked to your database, the slower your website will load.
- Disable unused modules via Stores > Configuration > Advanced > Advanced. Select the desired modules and click “Disable” from the drop-down menu. Save by clicking Save Config.
- Are you not sure what module is still in use? Go to the /app/etc/modules folder and locate the module’s .xml file. Move it to a temporary folder and clear the cache. If you do not experience any problem, you can permanently delete the module. Otherwise, just move the .xml file back to its original location.
9. Load parts of your Magento page in cache
Not all parts of your page have to be updated per visitor/session. This means you can cache the parts that do not require an update.
- You can activate APC Cache via your Combell control panel – please follow the instructions provided on our support pages.
- Use Varnish Cache. This way, previously viewed content will be served directly from memory. Read more about this powerful tool that comes with Combell’s Performance Hosting.
10. Does your Magento web store attract customers from all over the world? Make sure you use a CDN!
A content delivery network uses several servers spread all over the world, which contain your content. When a visitor from the US, for instance, visits your site, the content is retrieved from the nearest server, e.g. a server located in the US, not from the server located in Belgium. This can help you save quite a lot of time.
- Working with a CDN is particularly useful if your site has many international visitors.
- If your site only attracts visitors from Belgium/the Netherlands, a CDN will not be of much use.
- Famous CDNs include: Akamai Technologies, Amazon CloudFront, Azure CDN, Cloudflare…
Do you want to find out more about the fast and reliable Magento hosting services provided by Combell? Or are you curious about the exciting features of Varnish Cache? Check out the various options that come with Combell’s hosting packages, including a static IP address, extra databases, caching options and Expert Booster!
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