Techniques for optimizing Magento site performance – Fasterize

Magento Speed ​​Optimization Techniques

There are many reasons why a website may re-plan. For example, they may be related to images, scripts, or even e-commerce hosting. Let’s see how to optimize the speed of your Magento site on a case-by-case basis.

Optimizing Images on a Magento Site

An e-commerce site is potentially a heavier and longer to load site than a site with few features and little content, because it has a large volume of images and photos integrated on the product pages. However, these images are essential! Knowing that 27% of online searches take place on Google Images , it goes without saying that optimizing the images on your site has a double benefit: reducing the loading time of your pages, but also making you visible in image search results on Google (SEO).

To optimize your images and at the same time your loading times, several techniques are applicable, such as:

• think about compressing images, with or without loss of quality depending on your requirements, to reduce their weight (Magento extensions allow you to do this, such as Image Optimizer, as well as web performance optimization solutions which also allow you to apply all the other techniques for speeding up loading times);
• Lazy Loading so that only images visible above the fold are loaded as you navigate, preventing the browser from loading all the images on the entire page when it is not useful for the user;
• caching your images, as well as all static data on your site, to save loading time – your data is thus stored in memory (on the server, the browser or a CDN), which avoids the multiplication of requests for data that needs to be displayed recurrently;
• Also, make sure to use a descriptive file name to clearly indicate their content using keywords, in order to be correctly indexed by Google (SEO).

Configuring scripts on your Magento site

A website is based on code (JavaScript, CSS and HTML), and scripts can be essential for the proper functioning of a website. But you should know that they can also be responsible for slowing down the loading of pages. Indeed, these lines of code, which the browser must read and execute, tend to accumulate to offer added-value features on a site, and they are not always well prioritized. They can also come from third-party solutions (AB testing, advertising, etc.), and it is then more difficult or even impossible to configure these features exactly as you would like to preserve the performance of your own site.
It should also be noted that while the browser is processing a line of script, it simply stops loading the other elements of the page. This is why prioritizing scripts is very important for the user experience.

So, to optimize the loading time of a page, you should first configure the Magento CMS (Stores-Configuration-Advanced-Developer):

• merge JavaScript and CSS files: yes;
• enable JavaScript grouping: yes;
• minify JavaScript and CSS files: yes.

Finally, to further optimize the web performance of your Magento, we recommend that you concatenate your JavaScript and CSS scripts to reduce the number of files of the same type (go from 10 Java files to only 2, for example), as well as their minification to further reduce their size and weight. These features are offered by webperf optimization solutions, as is image compression.

Managing the hosting of your Magento e-commerce

When it comes to hosting, if there is one mistake that we see all too often, it is that of turning directly to “cheap” hosting solutions. So yes, when you start with few means, when the site is still not very busy and light, opting for hosting on a cheap platform is an interesting alternative, but it can only be temporary.

Far be it from us to imply that low-cost hosting is not efficient, it can perfectly meet the needs of certain sites, but it does not correspond to the needs of an e-commerce. Remember that hosting an online store is the basis of its activity: if the site is not available because the hosting does not support the load, the site is not accessible and therefore without visibility on the internet, and as a consequence: it does not generate sales. This is why choosing an optimized hosting solution that is in line with the needs of a Magento site is essential.

Finally, setting up a CDN, a content delivery network that allows the storage of site data on several servers located in different places around the world using “mirror” servers, allows for optimization of the loading speed of your website, especially if it is available internationally.