5 ways to speed up your store on Magento

The moment a website loads slowly, you lose interest in it, right? A similar mechanism works for online stores. The slower they are, the less willing customers will be to buy from them. Are you able to speed up your store on Magento? In the article below we present 5 of the most effective ways to do that in our opinion.

Advantages of a fast online store

The Kissmetrics study ‘How loading time affects your bottomline’ shows that increasing page load time by barely 1 second causes a drop in conversion rate by as much as 7%! What’s more, with such a downward delay, customer satisfaction also drops by 16%.

You can easily predict that every extra second your store takes to load in the browser window deprives you of a certain amount of revenue.

So, a fast store on Magento becomes one of the key elements in your business development strategy. Ensuring short loading times of your product pages will allow you to grow your sales much faster than your competitors.

How can you speed up your store on Magento? Below we show you 5 effective and proven by us methods.

How to speed up a store on Magento

Kissmetrics says in its report that the optimal page load time should be 2 seconds or less. At least this is what almost half (47%) of the respondents believe. How to get closer to this result?

1. Make sure you have a good server and its proper configuration

Fast hosting is one of the most important elements affecting the performance of a store on Magento. And it’s not worth saving on it if you think about running an e-commerce business seriously.

Regardless of whether you choose a dedicated server, VPS or a popular cloud server you must additionally remember about its proper configuration. Magento platform gives you huge sales opportunities, however, it requires an experienced administrator who will be able to set all the parameters in the most optimal way.

If you want to keep your store in the best possible condition, we recommend using the services of a specialized e-commerce agency, which will be able to support your store and develop it in the directions chosen by you.

2. Regularly upgrade Magento to the latest available version

In June 2020, Adobe officially stopped supporting Magento 1 development, focusing exclusively on Magento 2. Therefore, if you have a store on earlier versions of the platform, it might be a good idea to migrate.

How much does it cost to migrate to Magento 2? Check out our blog article: Magento migration – how much does it cost?

If you are already operating on Magento 2, it will be crucial to regularly upgrade your store to the highest available version. With each such update, you will receive not only new security features and bug fixes, but also many changes to optimize the platform. This, in turn, will allow you to increase the speed of page loading and improve the conversion rate.

3. Take advantage of CDN and cache capabilities

In order to speed up the operation of an online store, it is also worth using technologies dedicated to this issue. Here, you have CDN (Content Delivery Network) and website cashe options at your disposal.

CDN enables to distribute store files (e.g. images, scripts, css) among many physical locations scattered all over the world. This way, when a potential customer connects to your site, they will receive the necessary data from the location from which it will reach them the fastest. And the store itself will load into the browser window in a shorter time than if it had to download information from only one server.

The browser cache also plays a big role in the store operation speed. A well-configured module will make the shop load much faster by saving some elements of the website on the client’s side than if it had to download them directly from the server every time.

4. Optimize graphics files on your store

Store on Magento consists mostly of graphical elements. We are talking here not only about product images, but also about other additional graphics downloaded from the server every time someone types your domain name in the address bar.

What’s more, image files are usually some of the heaviest elements, so the large number of them can make your entire site take an unbearably long time to load.

Fortunately, there are ways to speed up the process. One of the most effective is proper image optimization. Changing standard graphic extensions into those dedicated to web uploads makes any website, even those with a large number of images, load noticeably faster.

5. Remove unnecessary modules

The speed of your store is not only affected by images, but also by the amount of code required to load.

That’s why one of the most effective ways to cut down on extra seconds when downloading a page from the server is to do some tidying up in the modules directory. Here, in theory, the case looks simple – if you don’t use any of them anymore, you should remove them.

Such action has also another advantage – unused or long outdated modules can be a gateway to your store, used by cyber criminals. Removing them from the server will prevent unauthorized people from exploiting vulnerabilities in the software for, for example, stealing important data.

Who will help you take care of the speed of your Magento store?

Optimizing your store loading speed on Magento is not an easy task. To do it yourself, you need a lot of programming knowledge and experience in working on this particular platform.

We guess that as an E-commerce Manager you are not able to work on store development and oversee the technical layer at the same time. Therefore, it is a very good idea to outsource the optimization work to a good e-commerce agency. An agency that has the resources and knowledge to accelerate your store.

 

Is your store running too slowly? Do you want to improve it? Get a free consultation and find out how we can help you!