I have a store on Magento 1.7 with around 600 SKUs. I will be running a promo campaign in coming weeks so there will be a increase in incoming traffic to my store. The current load time of my store is 20 seconds, which is not good. Since there might be an increase in traffic, this load time could become a huge issue for my store's performance. What do you suggest I should do to improve the performance even when there is an increase in traffic?
What hosting are you running on?
please provide more technical details,
Load time is dependent on different things. Specifically for Magento stores, load time may vary on reliable and fastest Magento hosting solution, cache technologies, traffic, no. of orders, lightweight theme, proper logics and codings, etc.
If you want to decrease the page load time and want blazing fast Magento store, I would recommend you to host your Magento store on Cloudways because Cloudways Managed Magento Hosting Platform is renowned for providing fast Magento store performance, thanks to its mighty ThunderStack recipe.
Cloudways has partnered with Amasty to offer you $320 Full Page Cache extension free of cost for all Magento stores deployed on Cloudways Magento Platform. This partnership now provides one of the world’s fastest Magento 1.x hosting stacks ever.
To know further more about it and see the benchmarks, please take a look at this below blog post:
Cloudways Full Page Cache Benchmarks
1. Install full page cache extension
2. Upgrade your hosting, get more resources, CPU.
Defer parsing javascript magento is a good way for you to reduce loading time and make site speed better and better by deferring JavaScript loading till the last moment until when the browser finishes loading HTML and CSS.