Why keep a check on the performance of your Magento store?
The time span a visitor spends on your website is ‘directly proportional’ to the performance of the website. If the performance sinks, the visitor time span decreases and if performance goes up, the visitors enjoy spending more time on your website.
To meet the necessity of a retailer to linger the visitors on your website for a longer period, performance acts as a major factor. It is quite obvious. Good performance means better user experience, which in turn builds a positive image in the eyes of a buyer to make a purchase from your store. This results in increased conversion rate. The continuation of the process, adds more and more people buying from your store and generating more business for you.
In case you own a Magento store, give yourself a pat on the shoulder. You have already walked the half way, as Magento is positioned on the top spot among open source E-commerce platforms.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking that your store will always perform sky-high since you are using Magento. You’re surely missing out something.
Magento in itself is a heavy CMS and runs slowly if right setting and configuration are not applied to.
How can you rectify few aspects of a Magento store performing badly?
Several techniques answer this question. Let’s discuss a few methods to increase the Magento page-load speed significantly.
Decrease file size of file transfers between webs server and browser: One of the best techniques to significantly enhance Magento store performance is to lessen the size of thee files transfer between browser and web server. In an absolute way you can do this in the following ways:
1. Compressing the CSS and JavaScript will save space of many bytes of data and decline downloading, parsing and execution time
2. Optimize Images by resizing them ( use only the required size, avoid big and extra sizes)
3. Enable GZIP compression
4. Instead of going for as full size, compress it by zipping it. Moreover, it increases your download speed
Reduce the amount of HTTP requests: Loading speed is considered as the most important factor in making the user-experience better. This reduces the number of HTTP requests and get handy with only the limited amount you need. There are a handful of methods available which will let you reduce the HTTP requests and upload a quality web page
1. Merging Javascript and CSS files
2. Combine images by using CSS sprites
3. Enabling the Apache KeepAlives to magnify the communication between browser and server
4. Use only those DOM elements which you require
5. YSlow assist you to design the complete layout with an excellent loading speed
6. Keep the CSS calls on the top and JavaScript calls on the bottom
Executing only the Required Caching Mechanisms: Enable all the caching mechanism from the Magento admin panel (System –> Cache Management). This is what can be done:
1. Improve the speed of the website by implement opcode cache mechanism. It decrease the load on non server when there are multiple request for the same page at the same time
2. Enable Memcache mechanism, as this helps in getting Magento’s heavy hits on your database by caching data away from it
3. Implement Redis, as it will discard the problems occurring while executing TwoLevels Cache Backend (i.e. to use Memcache together with the database). Moreover, it is contemplated as the most superior caching mechanisms for Magento
4. Varnish works as an HTTP accelerator: it acts as a load balancer. Therefore, use it to decrease the load time and reduce the response time
5. Use a content delivery network as it cuts down server load, by serving static content in the form of JavaScript files, CSS files and images through a network of servers informally located to your customer
Use Magento Panel to Optimize Performance:
1. Generally the Magento login mechanism is turned ON, turn it off from the admin panel
2. Turn on the Compilation to compile all the files of the magento installation, this will generate a sole include path to enhance the performance
3. By enabling flat categories and products, you can decrease the bottleneck performance of loading the product and category page
Magento performance optimization is an inestimable task and things may vary from developer to developer. These are just a handful of the points to improve the performance of your Magento store. However, if you want any support and advice, feel free to contact us, we can help you to enhance the performance of your store even better.
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