“Time is money” is an age old proverb that has not lost its pristine shine and significance in this jet age and people are now struggling hard to synchronize their daily life with their scheduled time duration. Similarly, when it comes to the web browsing, people often leave a particular site if it is not loading up quickly. The average website loading speed is around 2- 3 seconds and even a delay of few seconds can be catastrophic for the growth and expansion of your online business. In order to save your Magento site from the consequences of slow loading time, you need to implement these tips on your online store for getting the instant attention and engagement of your targeted customers.
1. Make sure that your site is on the latest Magento version-
For ensuring the seamless functioning of your Magento store, make sure that you are using the latest Magento 2 platform that is packed with various new features and functionalities. With the downloading of this newer update, various existing bugs and problems that were faced earlier has eliminated all together. This has made the working of various site tasks much faster and has improved the site performance to a great extent. Apart from this, you can try out the various Magento 2 extensions from Knowband that can help in optimizing the performance of your Magento store.
2. Utilize the services of Content Delivery Network (CDN)-
With the help of CDN, it is now possible to provide services to your targeted customers at the same speed irrespective of the location of your customers. You need to take the expertise of an effective CDN services that can ensure the seamless delivery of the product images, CSS files, javascript and other such components without any delay.
3. Implement caching on your Magento site-
Caching makes it easier to load a particular site and thus reduces the overall load that is falling on the site server. Various eCommerce sites use this caching technique that consists of NGINX + APC + Memcache + Varnish caching. Apart from this, you need to perform browser caching, Gzip compression, page caching and other such strategies for reducing the website loading speed.
4. Optimize your product images
For any Magento site, product images need to be detailed and optimized for getting the instant attention of your targeted customers. There are various image compression techniques like lossless image compression, TinyPNG extension, compressor extension and other such extensions that can help in the seamless compression of your product images without any loss of picture quality and clarity.
5. Make use of Expires headers for your Magento site optimization
By utilizing the services of Expires headers, browsers can easily determine the extent upto which a page component can be cached. Static components like images need to have far- future expires headers but it is recommended to have expires headers for all your page components. In order to enable this feature, you need to uncomment the required line and include “Expires Active On” above the line. Here is the sample code for enabling this feature. For more information about this topic, do check out this link–
https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#expires=
## Add default Expires header
## https://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#expires
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault “access plus 1 year”
Note- While using the far future Expires header, it is advised to rename the file name of component during the implementation of any changes.
6. Merge the CSS and javascript files into one single component-
It is now easy to merge the CSS and javascript files of your Magento site into one single file with the inbuilt feature of the Magento platform. This concatenation will reduce the HTTP requests from your site and will in turn improve the page loading speed to a great extent. Here are the steps that can help you in enabling this feature.
- You need to navigate towards the “System”- “Advanced” and then “Developer” option.
- Ensure that the dropdown option under the “Javascript settings” and “CSS settings” is set to “Yes”. Now, click on the “Save Config” option.
- Once, your CSS and javascript files are merged, you need to clear the cache of your Magento store.
7. Initiate the Magento compilation process-
It has been seen that by utilizing the compilation feature of Magento store, the performance of the site can be enhanced by upto 50%. Due to searching of the application files of Magento platform in a particular order during the page loading process, a significant amount of filesystem reads are lost. Here are the steps that can help in utilizing this compilation feature.
- You need to navigate towards the “System”- “Tools and then “Compilation” option.
- Click on the “Run Compilation Process” option there.
These steps will start the compilation process on your Magento site.
If you want to keep your customers engaged to your online store for ensuring better product sales and conversion rates, you need to work towards improving your website loading speed. Always remember that online shoppers would not wait for your site to get loaded properly as they are always “short of time” and has plenty of online options to choose from. For more information on this crucial topic, you need to check out our next blog- Turbo boost your Magento site with these tips- Volume 2.
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