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How to Speed Up Magento ®: Understanding Operations

Sep 4, 2014 2 min read 582 views
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How to Speed Up Magento ®: Understanding Operations

High-speed performance of a website is a key feature most valued by customers, it helps them to decide whether or not they wish to stay on your site.

Let us review simple steps that will help to speed up the performance of Magento ®, and also general recommendations on avoiding interruptions in website work.

Why do we need to know how to speed up Magento ®

Customers are very impatient. In most cases, they need a fast decision, solution for their problems or answers to their questions. The slower your web store is the more possible it is that the customer will ultimately leave the store without buying anything.

Besides, the site performance speed is assessed by Google’s search engine. There is even a corresponding section in the Webmaster interface. The faster your store accepts and processes queries, the higher ranking in search it will have, and correspondingly, the higher PR and visits level will be.

How do we speed up a store performance on Magento ®?

1. Clean the cache. This is very important. If you do not have an extension that is responsible for storing the data and queries, then you may need to consult with GoMage specialists. We will be glad to advise you on the best solution individually for your web store. If you wish to configure the store performance by yourself, go to File System => APC => Memcached => Redis cache => Varnish cache, then save the changes. Some webmasters were able to make their stores work 100 times faster;

2. Clean your databases from time to time. Many web stores have databases that are never actually used but processing their files takes significant time. On average, you can clean Magento ® log for 30 minutes without any special skills;

3. Usage of MySQL is of huge importance. All you need is to make slight modifications to file my.cnf, please see below for code that will help to improve the performance of Magento ®:


query_cache_type = 1
query_cache_size = 32M
query_cache_limit=2M

 

Let’s say you do not have access to the root directory, in this case, the path will be different – etc/my.cnf (or /etc/mysql/my.cnf). After accessing this file it is necessary to use PHPMyAdmin options and check the following variables:


$ mysql -u mysqluser -p magento_database_name
$ mysql> SHOW VARIABLES;

 

Now you only need to make a few changes to your php.ini file, namely the following:


php_value memory_limit

 

4. The choice of hosting platform plays an important role in the high-speed performance configuration. This parameter directly influences the speed of page loading. If your hosting server is unable to process the information faster than in 2 seconds, then you cannot expect to get a good store speed no matter what configurations you make.

5. If you process the images through Graphic editors (which is highly recommended) you need to save the images as ‘for web devices’. This will help to reduce the load and will save your customer’s traffic. In the same way check the settings for JS, CSS as many files may be shortened or compressed to make more space in the database tables.

6. Do not forget to enable compilation before starting your work. This function helps to use all active processes on your site which provides maximal store productivity. Go to your admin panel, then to System – Tools – Compilation, and feel free to press ‘Enable’.

As you can see, many solutions are quite simple. Magento ® system is easy enough to configure it by yourself, but if you do have any problems, please leave comments to this article or contact us directly by email. Please pay attention to the fact that you always must create a backup copy of your site before installing any updates, extensions, changing any settings, etc.

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