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Speeding up your Magento 2 store is essential.
Why?
The truth is that slow stores:
The problem is…
Magento 2 stores often require a lot of speed optimisation to make them load quickly.
That means you need to take matters into your own hands to fix it.
The good news is… It’s not that complicated to speed up your Magento 2 store – You just need to know what to do!
So in this blog, I’m going to show you exactly how to speed up Magento 2 with 10 practical tips.
What Will I Learn?
Ready to speed up Magento 2 to get better rankings and convert more customers?
Follow and implement these 10x tips.
Don’t overlook this step.
The easiest way to speed up Magento 2 is to ensure that it’s always updated to the latest version. Make sense, right?
Magento usually releases an update every 2-3 months. These updates include:
Part of the reason Magento 2 is so popular is because the development team is constantly improving it.
They are continually improving the performance optimization and speed of the platform.
Watch for new updates and keep your store updated with the latest version.
Extensions are an important part of Magento.
It’s the easiest way to add new features to your store without any coding knowledge.
Here’s the problem:
Every time you install an extension, you add new code to your site. The more Magento SEO extensions you have, the longer it can take for your store to load.
What’s more?
Some developers don’t understand the importance of developing extensions that have a minimal impact on performance. They are just focused on creating great features.
The result is tons of extensions out there that can cause speed issues to your store.
You need to regularly audit your extensions and remove any extensions that affect your load speeds.
Ask these 3x questions when considering removing an extension:
This ensures you only have extensions that add value to your store while limiting their effect on load speed.
Here’s the truth:
Think of your store’s theme as the structure of a house. If it’s built well – it will load fast. But poorly developed themes are doomed from the beginning.
Why?
Poorly developed themes often come with a lot of bloats.
“Bloat” is unnecessary code that’s added to the theme but could either be minimised or removed completely.
Before purchasing a new theme, ask the developer about the performance optimization.
Is the theme set up on a demo site?
Test the demo store using Google PageSpeed Insights.
This gives you an accurate overview of the theme’s performance and core web vitals.
Specifically focus on:
These 2 core web vital metrics are the best indicators of page load speed times.
Lastly, once you have installed your new theme, disable the theme features you don’t use.
Premium Magento themes come with lots of widgets and custom blocks you won’t use. Disable them to improve your theme load speed times even more.
Fonts have a more significant effect on loading speed than you might think.
Lots of our Magento 2 clients install new fonts when they are developing their store to see what they look like.
(The custom fonts are usually added to the <head> section of the page configuration file).
The thing is…even if the font isn’t being used, it will still be loaded anytime someone looks at the page. You need to delete it from the store if you want faster load times.
Want to increase website speed?
You need to get your images under control. This is especially true in ecommerce.
High-quality product images will help improve:
But you don’t need large images to showcase your products effectively.
So to speed up Magento 2 you must optimise your images and limit their impact on your site performance.
Here’s how to do it step by step:
Generally, your product images should be a maximum of 1100px by 1100px.
This will still allow you to enable the zoom function in Magento 2 without running into any pixelation issues.
Ensure that every image on your store is compressed.
Use a tool like ShortPixel to compress your image sizes by up to 82% without affecting the image quality.
This alone will speed up your store’s load speed.
What’s lazy loading?
“Lazy loading” is when your website only loads images as you scroll down the page instead of loading every image on the page at once.
Simply put – Images are only loaded as needed.
This is a highly recommended optimisation by Google and will significantly improve your Goolge PageSpeed scores.
Bonus tip: Serve images in next-gen formats on the front end of your store.
PNG and JPEGs are fast becoming a thing of the past. Magento 2 has extensions that allow you to serve images in WebP formats.
Decrease the size of each image without losing the quality and speed up your store.
CDN stands for Content Delivery Network.
It’s a feature that not enough Magento 2 store owners are taking advantage of.
In my opinion, using a content delivery network (CDN) is one of the easiest and quickest ways to speed up Magento 2 stores.
Here’s how it works:
If your store is hosted in the US and someone from Australia visits it, the data must travel thousands of miles before the website can load.
But if you can get your website closer to Australia, the load speed is much quicker.
That’s exactly what a CDN does.
It keeps a mirrored copy of your store on an Australian server. When someone from Australia visits your store, it loads the mirrored copy of your site quickly.
The visitor doesn’t have to wait for the data to come from the US. Cool, right?
My favourite CDN provider is KeyCDN.
They offer great value for money and directly integrate with Magento 2.
Store updates create new logs files.
Lots of log files can slow down a website and take up tons of space on your server.
Simply cleaning out these logs regularly can improve 2 things:
The best part is you can configure it to happen automatically!
Then on the left under “Advanced”, click on “System”.
At this point, you should be able to see the “Log Cleaning” option.
Simply fill in-
With your ideal “Log Cleaning” values and click “Save”.
Your Magento 2 store logs will be cleaned automatically based on the values you set.
Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator that reduces the:
…by storing a version of your store in a visitor’s browser.
Fortunately, this simple configuration is built-in to the Magento platform and can considerably affect your website speed.
To take advantage of it, just go to your store’s Admin panel and click:
Stores > Configuration > Advanced > System
In the drop-down under “Full Page Cache”, select “Varnish Caching”.
This will turn on the varnish cache feature and you should see the benefit almost instantly.
Caching has become a standard part of speed optimization for every site owner.
Not only that but Google also highly recommends implementing page caching on your store to improve user experience.
Here’s how it works:
“Caching” is when you create a copy of your store (a cache) in someone’s browser.
When that person returns to your store, rather than waiting for the store to be delivered from the server – it loads directly from the browser.
This means your ecommerce store will load almost instantly!
The Magento 2 built-in caching system works really well and it’s easy to turn on.
Just go to the Admin Panel, click on “System”, then “Cache Management”.
Now just check all the fields you want to be included in the cache and enable them.
Note that there will be a green “Enable” field under “Status” so you can see what’s included in the cache.
Sometimes you just need a pro to speed up Magento 2 site properly.
Magento SEO services specialise in the Magento platform.
They understand:
If you are finding it difficult to find a reliable agency that masters Magento 2, I suggest you contact my team at Search Logistics.
We know how to get the most out of the Magento 2 platform to maximise your sales.
Stop losing sales to a slow Magento 2 store.
Take advantage of all the Magento 2 speed features and spend time implementing each of the tips above. By doing that, you can:
A fast Magento 2 store can increase your SEO rankings and conversion rates overnight.
Who doesn’t want that, right?
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