7 Effective Tips to Boost the Performance of Magento 2

A slow-loading website is nothing but a recipe for failure for your online business.

Studies reveal that it can cost you up to 30% of sales amounting to $2.6 Billion annually.^[i]

Now, you won’t just be losing business but also be serving your customers to the competitors on a silver platter.

However, you can overcome this challenge by optimizing the speed of your Magento store.

Wondering how to do so? Fret not, we have got you covered!

This blog post discusses 7 effective ways to boost the performance of your Magento store.

Ready? Let’s go!

Effective Tips to Boost the Performance of Magento 2

Update to the Latest Version of Magento

One of the ways you can improve the speed of your website is to update Magento regularly. Magento releases updates every three months and introduces new features, bug fixes, and speed improvements.

You must ensure that you update Magento regularly and are not using the outdated version as it can result in major speed issues.

Change Hosting Provider

Server and system requirements are the two most crucial factors that help increase the speed of the Magento 2 website.

Even though SSL and 2B of RAM are prerequisites, it varies depending on the website’s needs as well.

A shared hosting plan is best for beginners. However, you can’t expect a fast loading speed with shared hosting and the cheapest hosting plan with limited resources.

Ensure your Magento hosting provider offers you adequate server resources to host a good amount of traffic and process enough server requests.

Moreover, look for a hosting provider that gives you an opportunity for scalability. If your present hosting provider doesn’t meet your requirements, you should consider changing to a hosting provider to speed up your website.

Audit Third-Party Extensions

Oftentimes eCommerce owners extend the capabilities of their stores with the help of third-party Magento extensions.

While these extensions may help add more features to the store, they also add up more code to your website, making it more complex. As a result, your website’s performance and speed take the brunt of it.

One of the ways to solve this is by auditing your extensions and assessing which ones are affecting the performance of your website. You can either optimize or remove these extensions completely.

Also, remove all the extensions that you don’t use anymore to make your website lighter and faster.

The two most useful commands to disable, enable, and manage Magento 2 extensions are:

Enable Caching

When a user enters a page for the first time, the server loads the content and displays them to the user. Simultaneously, it makes a copy of the page automatically and caches the page content.

So when the user revisits the page, the server generates the same page content again.

By enabling caching, you tell your visitor’s browser to store your website’s webpage temporarily.

Since the visitor won’t need to reload your website every time they visit it, loading times improve significantly on subsequent visits.

If you haven’t set up browser caching in Magento yet, now is the perfect time to do so.

You can do so by:

Going to
System > Cache Management, select all caches, Enable All of them and Submit.

Implement Varnish Cache

You can go more advanced with Magento cache with Varnish. It is an open-source solution and is far more advanced than Magento’s full-page cache.

It serves as a web application accelerator that “boosts” HTTP traffic, saves bandwidth, and improves server response time. It can be used to cache both dynamic and static content.

If some files are requested frequently, Varnish will cache them into RAM and prioritize them over other files. So next time these files are requested, they will be loaded quickly.

Varnish is a robust solution that can increase the speed of your Magento website. However, its configuration can be a little complex, so you might need the assistance of a professional.

Use Lightweight Magento Themes

Did you know that your website theme can significantly affect the speed of your Magento store?

If you use a theme with a lot of widgets, sliders, and custom blocks, it will take an eternity to load.

This will result in poor user experience and affect the revenue of your eCommerce store.

Therefore, before you purchase a theme don’t forget to take a speed demo with the Google Page Speed test.

Optimize Images

If your website has a lot of images, it may take a while to load them, causing a delay in website loading.

Therefore, to improve the speed and performance of your website, you need to optimize your images. And one of the ways to achieve it is through lazy loading.

Lazy loading is a method in which images are loaded gradually while users scroll down the page. It does not load all images at once, instead prioritizes them based on how the user navigates your site, resulting in faster page loading and a better customer experience.

To Summarize

By now, you know that a slow-loading website can negatively impact your user experience and may lead to a higher bounce rate.

In this blog post, we’ve shared useful tips to help you boost the performance and speed of your Magento store.

Need Help in Optimizing Your Magento Store? Contact Us!

References:

[i] Bold Eye Media- Your Slow Loading Website Is Costing You Money