How to Speed Up and Optimize Your Magento 2 eCommerce Website
It is not easy to select the eCommerce platform that best suits your online business’s needs. Even after you do, it’s always a challenge to keep it in shape. This is why you need the right resources to manage an online commerce platform like Magento, especially if you want it to deliver best performance. Tekglide a certified Magento development agency boosts your Magento store’s reliability with online commerce solutions.
If your store needs to be faster or is due for maintenance, we suggest you read our article on how to speed up and optimize your Magento website.
What are the leading platforms in the eCommerce world?
Suppose you’re defining your organization’s business architecture and need an eCommerce solution. In that case, one of the first questions we ask ourselves is: How many quality open-source solutions can provide online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system and control over their eCommerce site’s functionality, look and feel, and content?
Many names don’t come to mind when we answer this question, but what does Magento do? Magento is the top open-source online commerce solution for large projects, yet it can become our worst nightmare if we’re not careful. Its considerable weight is one of its weaknesses. This might result in losing visitors and money, especially if the platform’s elements are not installed or optimized. For Magento design and development, it’s crucial to approach it with care to detail.
How do you choose the Magento version that best suits your needs?
Paying the subscription fee for Magento Enterprise can pay off. This is because of its enhanced modules and functions, like customer segmentation and call center software. They lead to better store optimization, usability, and user experience. This boosts the sales conversion rate and increases revenue. Performance and safety factors are also vital when making such a decision.
Magento is complex and heavy, making it difficult to learn. Customizing the Community version of Magento can be expensive. It is due to its complexity and potential overlap with features in the Enterprise version. Magento 1.9 speed optimization involves improving the performance of your Magento 1.9.x store to ensure fast loading times.If you need any help, hire a Magento developer to upgrade your store’s performance.
Global brands such as Nestle Nespresso, Nike, Olympus, Lenovo, Ford, and Samsung use Magento USA.
What aspects of optimization are critical with Magento?
Magento, a popular eCommerce platform, requires infrastructure-level optimization for improved performance, regardless of its version. Using a multi-level cached installation can reduce response time by up to 75% compared to a standard Magento setup.
For an excellent online store, aim for a response speed and page load under 2 seconds. The response time of the first byte (TTFB) should be less than 200 ms.
Below, we describe the eight main optimization components in a Magento infrastructure:
- Apache Web Server is in version 2. x, from now on, Apache.
- PHP module version 5.5 or higher with the required extensions and PHP Zend Opcache accelerator.
- Magento EE 1.14.1 or Magento CE 1.9.1 with a post-installation optimization process.
- GNU / Linux x86-64 operating system (64-bit version).
- Database MySQL in version 5.6.
- Memcached distributed cache system.
- Reverse proxy with Nginx web server.
- Varnish as a reverse HTTP proxy cache.
Apache optimization
Apache needs some specific configuration parameters for Magento’s correct operation. To get friendly URLs and speed up searches on the Magento platform, you must configure link rewriting with the mod_rewrite module.
For optimization, configure persistent connections based on your memory size using the KeepAlive option and header module. This allows you to reuse connections with requests. Also, file compression (with the deflate module) is necessary since Magento generates a high volume of data.
Similarly, using a cache strategy at the web browser level (with mod_expires module) is essential. This ensures that the first access to the online store downloads all static resources (js, CSS, images, etc.) and stores them in the browser. This approach avoids making unnecessary requests..
You will also have to use and configure the Apache Prefork worker MPM. This controls processes, requests, and resource usage.
As with the rest of the infrastructure components, we will deactivate the logs to reduce disk reads and writes.
Optimization with a PHP accelerator
A PHP accelerator caches compiled PHP scripts. It saves time by avoiding the need to parse and compile the source code for each request.
Tests show that the PHP Zend Opcache accelerator performs best for Magento’s performance compared to Xcache and APC. The Opcache module has integrated into the PHP module since version 5.5. To optimize the PHP accelerator, adjust its configuration parameters. It involves defining memory consumption, the number of files to cache, and other settings.
Magento optimization
The default Magento installation requires further customization to improve its performance. Some of these options are:
- Activation of the cache. Magento integrates a cache system to serve files in a more quick way.
- Unification of JavaScript and CSS files. Magento has several JavaScript and CSS files (more than 40), which you must compress to function.
- Compact Database. Magento stores product and category information in a database, spreading it across many tables. It causes slow reading and writing of these since it must join that disaggregated information.
- Disable Magento logs, avoiding disk writes.
Optimization from GNU / Linux (RAM Disk creation)
To improve the Magento cache, which stores data in a filesystem directory, mount the cache directory on a RAM Disk. You can do this on the GNU/Linux system to make the reads faster.
MySQL optimization
Even though there are more regarded database servers available, MySQL has shown good performance. It is especially true when using the InnoDB storage engine. It performs well when serving light but constant and concurrent requests.
Some aspects of optimization are:
- Increasing the most connections since we have enough resources on our server.
- Activating the query cache.
- Expanding the memory that the query cache will use.
- The cache can only divide a specific amount of memory for each query, which depends on the cache’s size.
- The cache will keep a large number of tables for consultation.
- How many threads will the cache store for use in new connections?
- Once you have analyzed them, disable logs for slow queries and error logs.
Optimization with Memcached
Memcached is a general-purpose distributed system for the cache. You can set up a memory pool on a different server to store Magento’s operations and session variables.
Optimizing with Nginx as a reverse proxy
Nginx is an alternative engine to Apache. We recommend configuring it with Magento. As it is better than Apache, serves static content (images, documents, etc.), and compresses the content faster than Apache. So, Nginx will act as a reverse proxy for Apache, serving static content and passing dynamic page requests to Apache.
We recommend configuring Nginx this way or using a CDN such as Amazon CloudFront or CloudFlare.
Integrating CloudFront or CloudFlare with the Amazon S3 solution can be a good option. This reduces the number of requests processed by the Apache server, balancing the static content with Amazon S3. Additionally, if we create subdomains for it, we can send the content without cookies.
An important tip is to use file compression to reduce the traffic generated for each request. Additionally, deactivate the log level from an optimization point of view. Taking full advantage of Nginx is impossible due to Magento’s internal workings. Magento generates HTML documents, with few exceptions. As a result, Nginx cannot handle serving such documents as often as would be desirable.
Optimization with Varnish
Varnish will try to serve clients’ requests from the cache. This cache will be set up in volatile memory instead of on the hard disk, using the most memory available. Remember, Varnish doesn’t serve content with cookies because they can contain sensitive information. Magento is an eCommerce platform that uses cookies. So, Varnish cannot serve content with the optimizations recommended in this article. You can reduce your Magento website’s loading time and improve your user experience..
Conclusion
Keeping your Magento eCommerce site up to speed might seem challenging, but it’s not impossible. You have to take some precautions and be careful about a couple of pointers. To optimize for speed, start with well-developed code, a good template, and a userver that’s configured and optimized for your needs. With the right approach, you can enhance your site’s performance. Hire Magento developers from Tekglide for customized solutions.
