Websites today have so many features that most owners are very concerned about their performance because it is a very important factor in user retention. This is what significantly affects the conversion rate, bounce rate, traffic, and other important business indicators. In general, keep in mind that users tend to choose those online stores that load in the blink of an eye. If you’re here looking for ways to improve Magento 2 speed optimization, then we’re happy to tell you that you’re in the right place. Сontinue reading today’s article.
Poor performance can be caused by various reasons. Unfortunately, there are no universal performance settings. Much depends on your case. The best course of action when your site is running slowly is to identify bottlenecks and resolve any existing technical issues. So how do you improve the performance of Magento? Let’s look at the most common ways.
Table of Contents
Regular updates Magento 2
The easiest thing you can do to optimize Magento speed is to update to the latest possible version. New versions are released every three months and include bug fixes and performance improvements. By upgrading, you will not only speed up your online store but also get access to current security updates, and new features that help enhance the functionality of the website, as well as improve the interaction with customers and administrators.
The regular code optimizations that come with updates also have a positive effect on website performance and functionality – you don’t need to optimize performance as often as updates include this.
Enabling Varnish Cache
When a user visits your online store for the first time, he loads the content of the page. At this time, Magento automatically copies this page and caches the content. The next time that the user visits the page, the cache will play a very important role. The server will not need to re-generate the page.
When cache is disabled on Magento 2 sites, this is a pretty common problem. It is preferable to configure Varnish Cache if you have the chance rather than the default Full Page Cache. Varnish is installed in front of the Magento site and all requests go through it. Every time a user tries to open a page on the site, Varnish checks to see if it’s in their cache, and if so, returns it from there without passing the request to Magento.
The cache is stored in RAM, due to which it returns to the user in 100-200 ms in response. Thanks to the built-in health check tool, cached content can continue to be returned to users even if the Magento site is down. Also, this tool can be used when working with multiple backends. Varnish can load balance between different servers while excluding idle ones.
Setting up Redis
Redis is a rapid open source in-memory key-value data store. Read and write operations in Redis happen very quickly. Their backups may be written to RAM or kept on a disc. Redis is most frequently employed as a cache since it keeps all of its data in memory.
Magento 2 cache entries are organized into groups: configurations, layouts, HTML blocks, etc. If your online store has a large number of products, then the site cache will be huge. That’s why using Redis as your server-side caching will help you deal with this amount of data. And here is the evidence:
- Supports most advanced data types, including list, set, sorted set, and hashes. It provides a lot of flexibility;
- Atomic operations (either performed completely or not performed at all). This confirms that if two clients are accessing data at the same time, value is updated for the Redis server;
- Universal use. Redis is suitable for caching message queues and short-lived data;
- Redis installation is easy and configure. It can be installed by downloading the archives available at official site, and compiling and running it.
Setting Memcached
The next common mistake on our list that slows down an online store is an increased load on the database. The way to solve this problem is to use Memcached. It is a commonly used in-memory data and objects caching system to lessen the quantity of events when an external data source needs to be read.
The hash table offered by Memcached is rather huge. The old data is destroyed in the order of last use when the table is full due to consequent entries. This hash table frequently has quite large dimensions. Magento does not use Memcached for page caching, and only use for session storage. Redis is the best options for page caching. If not this, then use Vanish as alternative – an ideal choice.
Using the Content Delivery Network
The last but important item on our list is setting up a content delivery network. It will also help speed up your online store. A content delivery network (CDN) can be used to store media files. Then all media paths on store pages are replaced with CDN paths specified in the configuration. Here’s how it works:
- The browser requests some kind of media file – the store page opens in front of the buyer in his browser. The browser requests the media file specified in the HTML;
- This request is first sent to the CDN. If there are images in storage, it transfers the media directly to your customer.
- If the media file was not found, a request is sent to the web server. And when they are found in the file system, the web server sends them to the client’s browser.
Final Thoughts
The popularity of online stores is growing every day, and many businesses continue to massively migrate to online sales and the load on their online stores is growing. That is why the optimization request is and will be very popular. Agree, no one likes a slow online store, in which the response time from “Add product to cart” to payment in the checkout is too long.
Of course, the tips we’ve given in this article are just the tip of the iceberg, and there are many other things you can do to help speed up your site. But if you don’t know where to start, then start with them.
