Simple Ways To Boost The Speed Of Your Magento eCommerce Website

Since its inception, Magento has won the heart of millions of people worldwide as it is a highly popular open-source eCommerce solution that is accepted by professional developers and eCommerce owners.

The platform sets the elevation among all the eCommerce platforms worldwide because of its exclusive range of features.

However, a lot of professionals and businesses are complaining about the platform that it is too slow because of heavy CMS and some incomplete configuration and settings. Therefore, it is important to improve the speed of your Magento website by following some simple ways.

Boost The Speed Of Your Magento eCommerce Website

In this blog, you can find 10 highly simple yet effective ways to speed up your Magento eCommerce store, so let's have a quick look:

Editing .htaccess file:

Here, are some of the secrets of speeding-up Magento that are hidden in its .htaccess file itself.

Allow Output Compression:

You need to make sure that it will work only if mod_deflate apache module is installed already in your server. However, the following mentioned section will turn out on the module. However, it does is compress text, JavaScript and CSS before it is sent to the browser.

It results in a smaller download size of all the components for the browser, so Magento pages loads quickly. You can find the below lines in you .htaccess file and just uncomment the right lines that will finally look like following to allow output compression.

############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip

# Insert filter on all content
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Insert filter on selected content types only
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript

# Netscape 4.x has some problems…
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# Don’t compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don’t deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

 

Enable Expires Headers:

We all know that browsers make use of Expires headers in order to find-out how long a page component can be cached. However, static components such as images must have been far-future expires; however, in reality, all page components should have expired headers.

For turning on this high-end feature , you just uncomment the appropriate line and make sure to add “ExpiresActive On” right above it. Have a look below:

############################################ 
## Add default Expires header 
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#expires

ExpiresActive On 
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"

You should also remember that if you are using a far future expires header, you have to change the components' filename whenever the component changes. To get more information, click here: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Disable Etags:

When it comes to talking about the eTags, they are considered as a great way for browsers to validate cached components across subsequent visits. From a cluster, they can easily decrease a site served if the cluster has not implemented them properly. It is also the best option to just turn them off as mentioned below:

############################################ 
## If running in cluster environment, uncomment this 
##http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#etags

FileETag none

Change default setting from Magento Admin

Have you done all the changes in Magento .htaccess files till now? If yes, now let's concentrate on the Magento Admin settings.

Combine JavaScript and CSS files

Through below mentioned settings, you can combine the CSS and JavaScript files that in turn can help you out in decreasing the http request and making the response quicker:

- Magento admin -> System Configuration -> Developer -> Under “Javascript Settings”, change “Merge Javascript Files” to YES.
- Magento admin -> System Configuration -> Developer -> Under “CSS Settings”, change “Merge CSS Files” to YES
- Clear The Cache: Now, you ensure that you clear the cache. It is recommended that you note combining CSS/JS while using CDN will cause CSS/JS to break until the the CDN updates completely.


Enable Flat Catalog

Magento is making use of the EAV model in order to store customer and product data. Allowing the Flat Catalog for categories as well as products combine product data into one single table that enhances the performance by responding to queries quickly. However, if you store has 1000+ products,  you should allow Flat Catalog Products.

- In the Magento Admin, go to System > Configuration > Catalog.

- Under “Frontend”, change “Use Flat Catalog Category” to YES.

- Under “Frontend”, change “Use Flat Catalog Product” to YES. (optional)

- Clear the cache.

Enable The Magento Compiler

Important Note: It may also break your store if custom extensions are being used, so make sure about it. However, Magento's application files are searched in the following order:

- app/code/local

- app/code/community

- app/code/core

- lib

Every single time when a page loads, this search is performed that result in different filesystem reads. The number of reads has been decreased by the Mage_Compiler by copying all the app files to a single include directory. Moreover, it also caches the most often used pages.

1. In the Magento Admin, go to System > Tools > Compilation.

2. Click “Run Compilation Process”

Log Cleaning Through Admin


- In the Magento Admin, go to System > Configuration.

- In the left menu under Advanced, click system.

- Under “Log Cleaning”, you can change “Enable Log Cleaning” to “yes” and configure the Save log for 14 days:

Clean Magento Database

From a database, you can manually clean up by logging into your Magento database and truncated the following tables:

- log_customer

- log_quote

- log_summary_type

- log_url

- log_url_info

- log_visitor

- log_visitor_info

- log_visitor_online

So, these are some few things that one can do to make their website faster. Along with it, you can also contact a professional Magento developer, who can help you to make your store insanely fast.

Want to improve your ecommerce store ? 

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