As you are well aware of the fact that usage and demand of e-commerce websites is increasing at a faster rate. Magento, being one of the most feature-rich e-commerce platforms available today, is providing support for millions of the online stores. Search engine giant Google mainly focuses on speed of the website in ranking it on the results page. In fact, speed is not only important from ranking perspectives on the search engines, but also it plays a crucial part in driving traffic towards your e-commerce website with assured conversions. According to a research conducted by the world’s leading giants like Google and Microsoft, slower websites affect the businesses badly and reduce conversions ratio at an immense rate.
In today’s faster Internet service, the speed of downloading or accessing the e-commerce websites has improved greatly in the past few years. But, most of the online merchants are still struggling in making their web pages load quickly in just a single second or even less after clicking. It may be true that the entrepreneurs own user-friendly web pages, but they are not highly profitable if they take more than two seconds to load. The online customers do not like to shop from such e-commerce websites that take too much time to load.
In reality, time is as valuable as money and even a delay of one second impacts the conversions and revenues negatively. Therefore, it has become mandatory for the online retailers, who are presently using Magento powered shopping website, to enhance performance as well as speed of their online e-commerce store.
Improving performance of Magento website
As far as the above-description is concerned, it might have become clear to all of you that how important is speed and optimum performance for the e-commerce websites. All the online merchants can bring enhancement in their shopping site, but for fulfilling this purpose, they have to take several important techniques into account. Some crucial techniques or tips that surely help improve speed of your Magento powered e-commerce website and make its performance optimized have been elaborated below:-
1. Reduce the web pages size
Reducing size of the web pages is one of the most important techniques or tips that plays a significant role in improving both speed and performance of e-commerce website running on Magento. The unit of measuring the web pages is bytes, the smallest metrics being kilobytes. Elements included in the pages of a shopping website are: images of products, description, content, tags, CSS, JavaScript, etc. Smaller the size of a web page, more quickly it loads. Avoid the use of big images because they affect loading time greatly. The standard time that a shopping website must take to load is not more than two seconds.
2. Clear database log at a frequent time interval
Another great tip that helps to speed up Magento e-commerce website is to clear database log consistently. Most of the online merchants keep huge database of unnecessary data that results in slower speed and less effective online stores. Cleaning database log is not so easy, but it definitely reduces loading time of the websites.
3. Always use the advanced version
Magento is the most sought platform of e-commerce and a community of the developers keeps on releasing its new version from time to time. Every version of this superb e-commerce tool comes with improved functionality as well as features. So, always go for the advanced version in order to get better speed and optimized performance.
4. Compress the size of data
Another fruitful tip that lets your Magento e-commerce website load faster is to compress the size of data. For the successful acquisition of this task, you may use compression software like gzip or any other as per your choice. Remember that compression always takes part on the server side before sending it to a browser based on request of the users. During compression of data, changes are made in the server configuration files. The users must avoid the use of older browsers for getting the best loading speed experience while shopping.
5. Minimize the integration of third party tools or extensions
Although Magento is a highly powerful and flexible e-commerce platform and it facilitates the developers to integrate third party tools or extensions easily, but it is a wise option to minimize the number of extensions. It is because integration of too many extensions or third party tools increase the loading time.
6. Specify dimensions of the images
The next important tip that plays an essential part in reducing loading time of Magento e-commerce website is to specify dimensions of the images such as height and width. It helps the web browsers to create image placeholders for loading both images and page simultaneously. Browsers take a lot of time to load the images that are without specific dimensions, therefore the online retailers must set the attributes such as height and width for each image to ensure the fast loading.
7. Round Trips must be minimized
“Round Trips” number must be minimized to a great level when it comes to enhancing speed of e-commerce website running on Magento. For example, combine multiple files into a single one. This approach makes only one request instead of multiple trips and definitely reduces the loading time.
8. Periodic monitoring of the e-commerce website speed
The next crucial technique for optimizing the loading time is monitoring of the e-commerce website speed periodically. Improvement is mandatory for those web pages that load in three or more seconds. For measuring and diagnosing speed of the website, a variety of tools are available such as Pingdom, PageSpeed Insights. The score rate is assigned to the websites out of 100. If any e-commerce website has a score of 85 or more, then it indicates that it is performing extremely well.
9. Redirects must be avoided or minimized
Redirects on an e-commerce website must be avoided or minimized by the online retailers for improving speed of the website. Implementation of this technique ensures the webpages that load in a fraction of second.
10. Proper utilization of in-memory technology and caching
The final technique or tip used in this post for reducing loading time of Magento e-commerce website is utilization of in-memory technology and caching properly. This technique helps to avoid unnecessary access to database for optimal performance.
Hope, you have gone through all those crucial tips that will greatly improve performance and speed of your Magento e-commerce website. As an entrepreneur, implementation of these techniques in your Magento e-commerce website will give a unique experience of shopping.
Author Bio:
Jessi Brown is a professional Magento CMS developer working with PHPDevelopmentServices for a long time. He is also fond of writing on different topics regarding web designing & development.