How to increase download speed of Magento 2 Website

What is usually the first choice for an online eCommerce platform? You’re right, it’s none other than Magento. Magento is known for its power and flexibility, but sadly, it hasn’t been able to acquire a similar reputation when it comes to speed. As an eCommerce business owner, you want to be able to enjoy the most powerful eCommerce platform at the speed that reflects its power.

Is Your Magento 2 Download Speed Slow?

Several online merchants complain about their Magento website being slow and the pages loading slowly. In today’s fast-paced world, time is of the essence to the merchant as well as the customer. A slow website is a bad idea because however powerful the platform is, it leads to cart abandonment and the customers leaving. You obviously don’t want that to happen.

In this article, we will discuss how to maximize your Magento 2 website speed and performance using different techniques. But first, let us help you understand the reasons behind Magento’s slow response time and how that can affect your online sales.

What are the reasons for Magento 2 download slow?

A slow website is more of a burden than an asset because it is annoying for the merchant as well as the customer. Once we identify why Magento is slow, only then can we think of ways to tackle the problem and also increase the speed.

Since it’s a fairly common complaint, we have gathered some reasons why Magento is generally thought to be slow. The main reason is Magento being so resource-heavy. This is where we should understand that advantages can turn into disadvantages unless we handle them appropriately.

The most common factors and reasons that may lead to Magento being slow are as follows:

• Unlimited customizations and extensions
• The configuration of MySQL, NGINX, PHP and several other settings is not optimized.
• Disabled full page cache
• Outdated and slow hardware.

How does Magento 2 download Website affect your sales?

There is no denying that your Magento 2 website speed affects your store sales. Let us discuss how it may do that. We already know that a slow website leads to cart abandonment. So that is one of the factors. Another is that when a website is slow, customers may not even reach the cart.

Imagine needing to purchase a new smartphone. As a customer, you want to know the features of the phone, and you also want to be able to have a good look at the phone from all angles. If the page takes too long to load because of premium quality images, you wouldn’t know or care. All that matters to you is that you wanted the page to load and it took too long. So you clicked on the next available website or option you see.

As business merchants, you know that increasing the speed of your website can solve this issue. Statistics show that faster page loading times result in a higher conversion rate. They prove that users usually stay if there is a loading time of less than or equal to 2 seconds. Obviously, this implies that the faster your Magento store loads, the more likely it is for your store visitor to convert into your customer.

How will you know though, whether the reason for a dip in your eCommerce sales is due to slow website speed? You will get to know by performing a speed test using any speed test tool such as WebPageTest or Google PageSpeed Insights. If you aren’t familiar with them or find it difficult, you can always hire a Magento 2 development company to help you out.

How to Make Your Magento 2 Download Speed Faster: The Only Tips You’ll Need!

We are going to let you in on a little secret. Increasing the speed of your Magento 2 website isn’t as difficult as it seems. We have asked top-tier Magento developers as well as big names in the Magento community to come up with 16 useful tips that facilitate you in achieving and exceeding your eCommerce sales.

Here is how you can put Magento on steroids and boost its speed to add value to your store and projects.

1.   Choose Reliable Magento Hosting

Hosting is a very important factor when it comes to website performance optimization because server quality is what really determines your website’s speed. Selecting the right hosting company ensures that your Magento store delivers a smooth experience for the user with faster loading times.

Therefore, a better option than shared hosting is always going to be to choose a cloud hosting company, and especially one that offers enhancements and optimization as part of the standard Magento hosting solution package.

Hence, first and foremost, you should ensure that you choose a good cloud hosting provider that fulfills your hosting and all other technical requirements. Choosing the perfect hosting provider alone can bring you high-powered performance and maximize your sales as well as customer satisfaction.

2.   Update Your Magento Version

Always makes sure you use the latest version of Magento for your eCommerce website if website speed is a priority for you. Magento releases updates and new versions quite frequently and focuses on optimization as well as security. These updates contain bug fixes as well as performance and speed enhancements.

This makes this the easiest and most useful tip for increasing the speed of your Magento store.

So if you are using Magento 1, then the best thing for you would be to upgrade to Magento 2, and then keep checking for updates and updating regularly in order to be on top of your game.

3.   Use HTTP2 Instead of HTTP1

HTTP2 is based on an open specification communication and networking protocol developed to facilitate transporting web content. It is a lot faster than HTTP1 because it involves the implementation of key optimizations that help in easier and faster data transfer.

HTTP2 is better for Magento because it helps compress headers, work on a single connection in parallel, use several server requests at once, and also load multiple resources simultaneously. All this wasn’t possible earlier with HTTP1.

Therefore, it is highly recommended to discuss with your hosting provider about enabling HTTP2 in their settings. However, assuming you are already using HTTPS which you should be using anyway, HTTP2 should be activated automatically. Do optimize for HTTP2 though and don’t use outdated solutions.

4.   Use a CDN for Speed Optimization

A Content Delivery Network is an interconnected, geographically distributed network of cache servers that works by distributing the service that is closest to the user. This enables you to experience less of a lag because of minimum physical distance and faster website speed.

A CDN caches static content from your website store such as images, fonts, videos, JavaScript, CSS, etc. This way, it helps minimize the response time for your end-user. Configure and use an excellent CDN to optimize your Magento 2 website speed. Fortunately, Magento 2 supports the use of all Content Delivery Networks.

5.   Enable Caching

Even an incorrect cache setting can cause a hindrance to Magento’s performance and speed. Whether the cache was left turned off by someone who had the access to your dashboard, or perhaps a third-party developer, this can cause your website to become extremely slow.

You can turn the cache back on by doing the following steps:

• Log in to your Magento dashboard.
• Go to System and select Cache Management.
• Ensure that all cache types are enabled and that the status is green.

6.   Inspect & Minimize Third-Party Modules

It is not necessary to have a lot of extensions and modules. They burden the website with extra processing which has a negative impact on its speed as well as performance. If you want to know how to figure out which module to turn off, simply turn all of them off one at a time, so that you can see when there is an impact on the speed and performance of your store.

You can check by testing the front page, the category pages, the product pages, and checkout.

To be able to turn off modules, you are going to need SSH access from your hosting provider. Once you find the module that slows down your website, you can contact the developers, inform them that the extension is slowing down your website, and even ask them for a refund.

7.   Avoid JavaScript Bundling

JavaScript bundling is grouping the JavaScript files. Instead of making the website perform better, however, this makes it worse. When JS bundling is enabled, large files are created containing JavaScript code. This is what slows down your website, and precisely why you should not engage in it.

To turn it off, you simply have to:

• On your Magento dashboard, go to Stores.
• Click on Configuration and select Advanced.
• Click on Developer.
• Select JavaScript Settings and choose “No” where it says Enable JavaScript Bundling.

8.   While Managing Your Website, Keep It On Production Mode

Magento 2 has three main operation modes. They are the Default mode, the Developer mode, and the Production mode. The Developer mode and Default mode are used in the development and testing phase. The fastest mode, however, is the Production mode, and that is the mode you should use if speed optimization is a priority for you.

The Production mode ensures a good user experience because it is optimized for speed and performance. In order to turn on the Production mode, you will need to get SSH access, which you can get from your hosting provider.

9.   Use Varnish Cache

Fortunately, Magento 2 has a built-in Varnish solution that comes with the package, which drastically improves the speed and performance of your Magento website. Varnish is an HTTP accelerator and it boosts your web performance. It does this by saving a copy of your web page in RAM the very first time a user pays a visit to your store. This helps you manage traffic and boost your website’s performance at the same time.

10.   Enable gzip Compression

By enabling gzip, you enhance your website’s performance by freeing up space. Gzip does not only compress images, you can use it to compress stylesheets as well as web pages at the server level right before they go to the user’s browser. This has a big influence on the speed of your website. Gzip works for text files such as fonts, HTML, JS, CSS, JSON, text, and much more.

If your gzip is not enabled, you may have to follow the instructions given by your webserver to enable the gzip compression at the server-side. If you find this difficult, which it is, you can always hire a Magento customization company that offers Magento optimization services to do it for you.

11.  Use ElasticSearch

You want your customers to have the best experience and that is what ElasticSearch promises and also delivers. It provides very high-speed full-text searching. It offers a super-fast searching capability because it runs the indexing service on the server and does not search the entire database every time for a match.

12.  Update the Indexers Regularly

Magento helps you in reducing load time by letting you work with bulk data. However, to gain from this, you have to manually and regularly update the indexers. Magento reindexes its indexers every time the core system updates the indexers on each object that is stored by default.

You can update the indexers using this CLI command using the SSH terminal on the root directory:

“php bin/magento indexer:reindex”

13.  Leverage the Built-In Feature That Lets You Merge & Minify JS/CSS

By merging the CSS as well as JS files, your browser needs to send fewer requests. Obviously, this has a dramatic impact on the speed of your website, especially when paired with minification which means the file sizes are also minimized. The feature basically allows you to be able to merge your JS and CSS files into one.

However, you should note that with Magento 2.2 and further, these settings are visible in Developer mode only.

• On your Magento dashboard, go to Stores.
• Click on Configuration and select Advanced.
• Click on Developer.
• Select JavaScript Settings and go to Merge JavaScript Files.
• Choose “Yes” for Minify JavaScript Files.
• Then, select CSS Settings and go to Merge CSS Files.
• Choose “Yes” for Minify CSS Files.
• Click on Save Config and then clear the cache.

14.  Enable Flat Catalogs

All of your store data in Magento is saved in a database. When the data crosses its predetermined limits, it slows down the website. You may avoid this by enabling Flat Catalog Product and Flat Catalog Category offered by Magento. This will help you improve the speed and performance of your eCommerce store.

15.  Delete Database Logs

The reason why Magento database performance is not the best is mostly because of all the space that is taken up by the database logs. Once these are removed, the performance significantly improves because the lag is minimized. It is important to note here though, that you should always back up the log before you delete it.

16. Use Distributed Memory Caches

Distributed memory caches such as Redis and Memcached speed up your large-scale Magento web applications and websites with dynamic databases. They minimize the database request load and let external data requests determine when they deliver cached data. These memory caches offer full-cache support with a super-fast backend cache and little to no need for any additional low-level system cache. This helps boost performance and speed.

• Take Help From Store Design Agency

If you hired the Shopify web design agency for designing your eCommerce store, they could also help enhance the download speed on Magento 2 store. The majority of eCommerce web design agencies offer post-development maintenance support, so you can also ask them to fix the glitches impacting the download speed.

Wasn’t That Quick?

You want Magento because it is the best but you also want it with excellent speed because that is eventually what helps you convert and keep those customers. Short loading times and overall good performance and speed are what can take your eCommerce website to new heights, of course, if your products and customer service are equally good.

It is actually pretty easy to optimize performance and speed if you are familiar with Magento and how it works. Simply use our tips to boost your sales and revenue by causing an increase in your Magento 2 website speed and optimizing performance, thereby giving your visitors a memorable user experience.

If you use another platform and this article convinced you to migrate, you can always hire a Magento 2 development company that offers Magento integration services as well as migration services to make your transition a lot easier and smoother.

FAQs:

1.What is Magento Optimization Cost in UAE?

On average a Magento developer in UAE charges from $10 an hour to more than $200 an hour depending on their qualification and skills that they have. It would be difficult to arrive at an estimate for optimization because it really depends on the size of your Magento eCommerce store and how much work it requires.

For instance, if you require a migration from Magento 1 to 2 as well, it would cost more. The bigger your product portfolio is the more it would cost for optimization because it would also require more time. It also depends on how complex the features and functionality of your store are and whether you want to add more features while you try to optimize it.

2. How to find the best Magento Optimization Company in Australia?

The best Magento optimization company would be one that not only understands the world of Magento thoroughly but also pays equal attention to every minute detail in your Magento eCommerce store. It would be a company that understands your issues and optimizes your website keeping your customer and you both as a priority.

The best company would also be hiring Magento certified developers and have experience in the industry that you are working in so that they understand the nuances better.

Folio3 is a Magento-certified company with years of experience in Magento development. Its customer testimonials and reviews should tell you alone what its clients think of the work it has done. Moreover, they will work within your budget and give you value for money, and also deliver within the specified time frame.

3. Is Magento Optimization affordable for small businesses?

Magento Optimization is definitely affordable for small businesses. If you already have a Magento website, then optimization simply depends on the website you have. With a small business, it’s a basic assumption that your product portfolio is not too big and also not too complex. There is a range of developers available who offer different rates and you can always choose someone you can afford.

4. How is Folio3 the best Magento optimization company in the US?

Folio3 is easily the best Magento optimization company in the United States for several reasons. The United States is a huge country with a lot of options, so one can only judge the best by how the customers and clients view the company. To have loyal clients in a country with so many different options available, a lot of them even being cheaper alternatives, says a lot about the company.

Folio3 has a fiercely loyal and satisfied client base that can be seen in the customer testimonials and success stories, and the fact that they always come back for other projects.

5. Is Magento store quicker than Shopify store?

Magento stores are excellent for eCommerce businesses and have some top-notch features available. However, if you consider speed, Shopify stores are faster, since on average, loading 1MB will only take three seconds on the Shopify platform, while Magento takes around five to seven seconds.

6. Can Magento developers create Shopify stores?

No. While some Magento developers may also offer Shopify development services, it’s not recommended. As an individual platform, it is highly recommended to hire a specialist Shopify app development company that understands the technicalities of the platform and helps you create an aesthetically pleasing and functional website.