The speed with which a page loads on the internet is very important to your business. A site that loads faster will encourage customers to be more engaged. This will result in happier customers, thereby generating more sales. If your site loads slowly, customers will exit your website and visit competitors’ websites. This is the main reason why you will need to employ steps for Magento performance optimization. It is true that some speed optimization change will require extensive in-depth knowledge of Magento platform, but nevertheless, there are others that require no programming skills at all which are almost as effective. Let us understand how we can improve Magento performance. 

What Are Some of The Things That Affect Magento Performance?

Before we dive deeper into how to speed up Magento, let us look at some important variables that affect Magento performance. Magento websites may run slower mainly due to wrong configuration and wrong choice of hosting provider. Magento is very versatile and you are not limited by SKU numbers. You need the right hosting. If you are not tech savvy, you will certainly need to hire a Magento developer to help you along the way. Another common problem is that there are too many choices of a variety of product attributes. If you have customizable products on your Magento site, your customers will be able to choose the quantity, color and size of the product, increasing the attributes. Adding just a couple of color options would not be so bad, but adding 10 product attributes with hundreds of choices would result in slowing down a Magento website. Your website may also be slow because it has too much code to load. Now let us see how to improve the performance of your Magento website. 

Magento Optimised Hosting

Many businesses make the mistake of opting for the cheapest hosting service offered to them. Hosting is the foundation of your e-commerce store and it is in your best interest to invest in a good foundation. Some of the good providers offer Magento optimized solutions. Talk to customer support to find out the best solution for your store. You could also consider shared hosting if you are just starting out. Shared hosting allows many small websites to be on one server. If you have small inventory and are just starting out, this is an ideal option. However, if you have a large inventory and lots of web traffic, your website will have fewer chances of crashing if it were hosted on a dedicated server. 

Enable Cache

By enabling your site’s cache, it will improve your overall performance by allowing the site to load faster by keeping track of the pages your visitors access. You will need to first enable Magento internal cache by going to the admin panel, open ‘system’ followed by cache management. After you have enabled internal Magento cache, enable the cache in app/etc/local.xml file. If you need help with this, you can hire a virtual Magento developer. 

Optimize MySQL Database

In a few instances, website databases give slow commands as they need to be optimized. Your data comprises of anything from product listings to a comprehensive wish list. Using the MySQL tuner script, you should first gather MySQL internal statistics which will tell you what is wrong with your database server and what needs fixing. You will need to install Perl interpreter also on the server. It is advised to hire a Magento developer to help with the database configuration. 

Reduce Time To First Byte

Time to first byte (TTFB) is the measure of how quick browser requests are responded to. There are three separate components – the time needed to send the HTTP request, the time required for the server to process the request and the time needed for the server to send back the first byte of the response to the client. This is the main speed parameter that tells you how quick your Magento store is. There is a Magento built-in tool called Profiler, which will help you tweak parameters for Magento speed optimization. An ideal TTFB should be below 1 second. 

By using the above tips for Magento optimization, it will make your online store faster to load and attract more potential customers. It will enhance the user experience and will save you money in the long run. This will also help introduce more customers to your website and will improve your business cycle.