How long are you prepared to wait for a website to load before you click off and look for the information you need elsewhere? Just a couple of seconds? We thought so. Page loading times have a huge impact on user experience. If a page does not load within a couple of seconds, users are likely to find the information they need somewhere else, meaning the businesses potentially misses out on sales. If your website runs slowly it can also have an effect on your ranking. Although Google takes hundreds of different things into consideration when ranking your site, speed is thought to be one of them.
If you are using Magento as your ecommerce platform then you will benefit from the fact it is already very SEO friendly. An area where it does struggle though is in site speed and page loading times. Magento is known to be quite a heavy ecommerce platform that will run slowly if you fail to optimise its settings. Even experienced web developers miss these hidden settings if they are unfamiliar with the platform. In this article we will explain some of the ways you can improve the speed of your Magento site in 2014.
Is your Magento ecommerce store running slowly? See below for information on how to speed it up and improve its performance.
Speed up Magento database by flattening products
If you have thousands of products listed in your inventory, you may want to consider flattening them in order to speed up page loading times. Each of the products and categories you have listed in your inventory will be made up of database tables. A table is required for every single one of your products’ attributes like price, description, name, weight and colour (to name a few). By condensing your product attributes, your site will be able to load the information much more quickly. To do this you will need to go to ‘System,’ ‘Configuration’ and then ‘Catalog.’
Compile your Magento website
Compiling your Magento website is a little like flattening your Magento database in order to speed things up. Basically compiling your website involves taking all of the active scripts in its core structure and bringing them to the ‘front.’ If you do decide to compile your website, it is important to keep in mind that you will not be able to upgrade your Magento store, or install / change any of the core or extension settings.
If you need to make changes, you will need to decompile your Magento website. Compiling and decompiling can both be carried out by going to your dashboard and then clicking on ‘System,’ ‘Tools’ and then ‘Compilation.’
Is your Magento ecommerce store running slowly? See below for information on how to speed it up and improve its performance.
Speed up Magento database by flattening products
If you have thousands of products listed in your inventory, you may want to consider flattening them in order to speed up page loading times. Each of the products and categories you have listed in your inventory will be made up of database tables. A table is required for every single one of your products’ attributes like price, description, name, weight and colour (to name a few). By condensing your product attributes, your site will be able to load the information much more quickly. To do this you will need to go to ‘System,’ ‘Configuration’ and then ‘Catalog.’
Compile your Magento website
Compiling your Magento website is a little like flattening your Magento database in order to speed things up. Basically compiling your website involves taking all of the active scripts in its core structure and bringing them to the ‘front.’ If you do decide to compile your website, it is important to keep in mind that you will not be able to upgrade your Magento store, or install / change any of the core or extension settings.
If you need to make changes, you will need to decompile your Magento website. Compiling and decompiling can both be carried out by going to your dashboard and then clicking on ‘System,’ ‘Tools’ and then ‘Compilation.’
Installing specially designed Magento modules can help you to speed up the page loading times of your Magento website. It is worth bearing in mind though that other third party modules and extensions can slow down your Magento site, so if they do not add a lot of value to your website, it may be a good idea to remove them.
Best Magento hosting
If you choose a cheap hosting company that does not have a custom setup for Magento sites, then expect poor quality hosting. When it comes to choosing a host for your ecommerce store, it is recommended that you choose a provider that specialises in Magento website hosting. This is due to the fact that they will use the correct server settings for optimising the speed of your Magento site. For example, they will already have PHP opcode cache installed on their servers and will be optimised for MYSQL.
For a quick suggestion, you can look at this article: http://magento2x.com/top-3-best-mage...-winning-2014/
One last thing…
It is probably best that before you go about altering all of the settings that you make sure you are running the latest version of Magento! New releases usually include performance improvements that will boost your site speed.
Carrying out the tips outlined in this article should help you to speed up your Magento ecommerce store. If you are still having issues or you are not confident in carrying out the manual configurations yourself, it is highly recommended that you get in touch with an experienced and professional web development company like us here at Online Media Direct!
So you don't know how to do, even though you know what to do? Leave a comment here please