24 Feb 2015

How to speed up your Magento

Magento is popular open-source ecommerce solution and is accepted by professional developers as well as ecommerce Owners.

Almost Magento Developers and owners said magento is too slow but we should try to improve magento site speed because site speed is not important only for search engine but mainly for users also. Magento is slow because of heavy cms as well as some incomplete configuration and settings.

Below you will find top tips and tricks to speed up your magento store.

1) Magento caching : Magento is giving best caching functionality so we should enable it after complete your developer work. (system -> cache Management)

2) Compressing Javascript & CSS : You should compress css and Javascript after your development work because reduces downloading and parsing so ultimately affects to execution time.

Internet speed

3) Enable Flat Categories and Products : Each product or category information are stored in multiple tables so at each time large join query is required to collection information in category or products pages.
System->Configuration->Catelog Panel -> Catalogue -> Frontend. You will see 2 options here so make both options to Yes.

4) Merge CSS and JS files : In magento website, lots of CSS and Javascript files are available and increase number of http request. So we should merge these css and js files so it will reduce server request and speed up site.

System > Configuration > Advanced > Developer, JavaScript Settings, CSS Settings. Set “Merge Javascript” Files and “Merge CSS” Files to “Yes”

5) Expires Headers : By using the expire headers or cache control headers, you can reduce number of http requests and its size which will improve page speed.

6) Clean the Database : Magento site’s database can quickly become overgrown because of unmaintained log tables. So at every 1 or 2 month you should monitor these tables and clean up. You can set clean up facility in magento admin section.

System -> Configuration -> Advanced -> System -> Log Cleaning, Change “Enable Log Cleaning” to YES and configure the timing and then click to save.

7) Optimize Images : Select a proper file format and try to compress these images. So It will reduce bandwidth between browser and web server. Lots of tools are available like imageoptimizer.net, JPEGMini.com etc

8) Enable GZIP Compression : By GZIP compression you can cut down size of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files sent over the network and reduces download time.

9) Use Sprite images : with help of sprite images, you can combine images and so It will help to reduce server requests.

10) CSS and JS files placing : Always put your css files at top of the page and javascript files at the bottom of the page so it assist to boost the progressive rendering in several browsers, thus increase page load speed.

Happy speeding 🙂

If you need any help, we can do a Technical Magento Audit for your site.

Author: Harshal Shah

Harshal Shah is CEO & Founder of Xhtmljunkies, Located in Gujarat, India, XHTML Junkies is one of the best companies that offer unique eCommerce solutions by the virtue of its dedicated professionals. Our professionals are extremely proficient in offering development services pertaining to eCommerce. You can find Harshal on Google+ and Twitter.