3 “Hacks” To Speed up Magento

A slow website or more specifically a slow ecommerce site will cause visitors to abandon very quickly. There are many studies and statistics that show a slow Magento store will have a higher abandoned cart rate. 40% of users will likely abandon your site if the page load time is over 3 seconds and 77% of those users are unlikely to ever visit your site again. Let's check out 3 of our favorite hacks to speed up your Magento store.

Use the Magento Flat Catalog

Magento stores customer and product data using the EAV (entity attribute value) model. By enabling the flat catalog option for products and categories, you merge the data per product and category into 1 line in 1 table, respectively. This makes queries to MySQL super-fast.

1. Navigate to “Stores” → “Configuration” → “Catalog”
2. Under “Storefront” set “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product” to “Yes”
3. Click button for “Save Config”
4. Be sure to Clear Cache on your site

Optimize Images

Over 50% of a website's total size and bandwidth consumed is from images. However, most teams are unaware of some simple ways to drastically reduce the size of images which will greatly reduce the page load time. There are a number of options to do this, you can optimize prior to uploading to your Magento store or enable automatic image processing on your web server through tools like AWS Lambda, PHP GD2, or Imagemagick. If you are using Photoshop, try adding one of these plugins; TinyPNG Extension or SuperPNG Extension.

Optimize Off-site Third-Party JavaScript and Merge/Minify On-site Javascript

Javascript, in general, can slow down a website significantly. Lucky for you Magento provides a built-in feature to merge and minify on-site Javascript. To do so, you will need to follow several steps:

1. Navigate to “Stores” → “Configuration” → “Advanced” → “Developer"
2. Set "Merge JavaScript Files", "Enable JavaScript Bundling" and "Minify JavaScript Files" to Yes
3. Be sure to run the following commands once above is completed

bin/magento setup:upgrade

bin/magento indexer:reindex

bin/magento deploy:mode:set production -s

bin/magento setup:di:compile (Here was the secret, to run the di:compile after production)

bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

This alone does not completely fix the issue, you will also want to optimize third-party JavaScript. Since so many sites are integrated with third-party tracking tags/pixels, chat features, and many others, you will want to load these Javascripts asynchronously instead of synchronously. This will make sure they do not execute blocking behavior in case of third party crash. You will also want to make sure all these third-party files are set to load after the initial page load.

To conclude, page load time isn’t a significant impact on Google rankings, but it does contribute to your site's conversion rate. An important factor to remember; for every 1 second reduced from page load times, you should expect to see a boost in conversions and repeat customers!

MW2 has implemented these tips on many Magento 1 and Magento 2 stores as well as many other front-end and back-end Magento optimizations to maximize your store's potential.

Contact us today to have a free analysis of your website.