Most of the online users are always in a dearth of time and are in mood to wait for even a few extra seconds while accessing a particular website. Due to this habit of impatience, they often leave a particular site without even completing a particular task and thus adds up to your list of shopping cart abandonments and thus affects your product sales to a great extent. All this significant loss to the credibility and popularity of your Magento site can be effectively tackled by reducing your website loading speed to an acceptance level. Don’t test the “patience” of your targeted customers while trying to access your particular website. But, try to provide them a seamless ride through the entire process by implementing these site optimization tips on your Magento site.
1. Make sure to enable flat catalog on your site
In order to improve the performance of your Magento store, it is important to enable the flat catalog for various categories and products on your site in order to facilitate their seamless merging into one single table. Due to this step, website performance is said to improve drastically as MySQL queries can now be processed in a faster manner. For utilizing this effective feature, you need to perform the following steps:
- Click on the “System” -> “Configuration” and then “Catalog”.
- Now, click on the “Frontend” and then change the “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product” option to “Yes”.
- After the above step, click on “Save Config” option.
- It is advised to clear the cache. One of the recommended way to perform this is by deleting everything from the /var/cache directory. Otherwise, you can also do it by following these simple steps.
- Navigate towards “System”-> “Cache Management” and then click on the “Flush Cache Storage” option for deleting the entire cache from your Magento site.
2. Delete unwanted files from Magento database and clear up your logs
Due to the default settings of the Magento, the log files in Magento are stored for upto a period of 180 days. This results in storage of a large number of log files which ultimately occupies a lot of your Magento server space. To avoid such a situation, site owners have the freedom to change their settings to a smaller time duration like two weeks (14 days) to reduce your occupied space. To perform this action, just follow these simple steps.
- – Go to “System” -> “Configuration” -> “Advanced” -> “System”-> “Log”.
- – Now, under the “Save Log, Days”, you need to change the settings over there to 14 days or any other specific time period of your choice.
- – Finally, click on the “Save Config” option.
- Apart from this, you can also perform the above task in another manner by clearing up your lob tables manually in your database. To do this, follow these steps,
- – For this, you need to select all of the log_% tables from the phpMyAdmin and then select the “Empty” option from the drop down menu.
- – Now, click on the “Yes” option when a popup asks you about whether you want to truncate the tables or not.
3. Install only limited number of extensions on your site
It is a known fact that too many extensions often utilize too many server space and resources which ultimately affects your website loading speed. This is due to the numerous reasons like running up of multiple HTTP requests along with the additional loading up of the CSS and Javascript files. In order to optimize your website performance, you need to install the only relevant Magento modules that can perform multiple tasks at one go. If you are clueless about which extensions to choose for your Magento store, you can check out the various amazing eCommerce plugins from our Knowband store. For disabling the other rarely used extensions, you need to perform the following steps.
- Go to “System” -> “Configuration” -> “Advanced” -> “Advanced”-> “Log”.
- Now, in front of the required plugins, you need to select the “Disable” from the drop down box and then click finally on the “Save Config” option.
4. Configure your MySQL database- This open source relational database management system (RDBMS), MySQL consists of its own “query cache” that is utilized on the Magento platform for the generation of dynamic pages and content in order to improve your site performance. Take a look at some of the recommended settings for your my.cnf file.
query_cache_type = 1
query_cache_size = 32M
query_cache_limit=2M
Apart from this, the recommended settings for php.ini file is as follows:
php_value memory_limit 128M
5. Optimize the Magento server configuration for your site
An effective web hosting server can play a decisive role in improving the website loading speed and is one of the important site optimization tips. If this is not the case with your Magento store, there are possible chances that your site may crash or go down due to the large incoming site traffic. Thus, to avoid such issues, you need to have a reliable and robust Magento server that can handle the multiple HTTP requests from numerous clients.
6. Use a productive theme for your website
For making your website as the ultimate obsession among your site visitors, you need to have an appealing Magento theme that can improve the functionality and performance of your Magento site. The theme allow site visitors to perform various tasks with great ease and without any headache. There are various free themes like Eros, Wine Store, Glamour, Blue Scale, Bag Store and such others that can help in giving a unique look, appeal and functionality to your Magento store for improving the customer engagement, site traffic and various other site performance metrics.
7. Update indexes of your Magento site
Although, indexes are automatically updated on the Magento platform by default whenever an object store is added. But, in some cases, this process does not take place automatically and needs to be done manually. This index updation is important as it improves the performance of your MySQL queries. To accomplish this crucial task, you need to implement the following steps.
- Navigate towards the “System” -> “Index Management”.
- Now, you need to select all the indexes or those indexes which you need to update. After this, you need to choose the “Reindex Data” option from the dropdown menu.
- Finally, click on the “Submit” button.
Now, by implementing these mind blowing site optimization tips, Magento site owners can easily speed up the performance of their Magento store to a great extent. With this crucial information, you can effortlessly improve the online shopping experience, customer engagement and site traffic on your online store and can easily tread the “first step” towards being a market leader in your particular business segment. For making a drastic improvement in the field of site optimization and performance, you need to check out the final part of this series of article titled- Turbo boost your Magento site with these tips- Volume 3.
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