According to a study that is often quoted from the Aberdeen Group, a one second delay in your Magento site speed leads to 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions. This means that if your site is making $100,000 per day, a one second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year. One second. That’s all it takes to drive traffic away at an alarming rate.
Despite the size of your business and its established position in your market, if you do not know how to adequately monitor and improve upon performance, your business will suffer. Bottom line…one second may seem like an insignificant number, but it can cost you a substantial amount of future sales.
If you’ve got a great product and a beautiful site, the faster it is, the higher your conversion rate will be. It’s just that simple. So, check out a few of the ways you can speed it up and help take sales to the next level!
Now for Our Top 10 Tips to Improve Your Magento Site Speed
1. Merge CSS and JS Files
By merging CSS and JS files into fewer files, your customers will have to download less data when loading your store, which results in a more responsive and faster browsing experience. This procedure can vastly improve your Magento site speed by minimizing the number of http requests.
2. Optimize Content and Images
Waiting for large images to load is like sitting in two hour traffic for a regular 30 minute drive…frustrating. In all honesty, people are just not patient. You don’t want to lose customers’ attention by having them wait for your content to load. So, reduce your file sizes. Additionally, ensure your images do not exceed the desirable sizes by compressing image files. Ultimately, this will make your content load much faster and alleviate customer frustration.
3. Enable Flat Tables for Products and Categories
Separate database tables, sorted by datatypes, store categories and product features. Flattening will combine all attributes in a single table for Magento retrieve, rather than collecting data from 10+ tables each time you need product data. Why is this important? If your site has more than 1,000 products, flattening products will make load time substantially faster.
4. Enable Magento Compilation
Magento’s Compilation feature allows you to compile all files of a Magento installation in order to create a single path. This feature can boost performance to upwards of 50%. The compiler reduces page reads by copying all of the files into a single directory, while also caching ones that are used frequently.
5. Full Page Cache
Full page cache is imperative in order to avoid downtime during periods of high traffic. This feature increases Magento site speed by reducing server response time. Essentially, once the server generates a page, it does not need to generate it over and over. Instead, it returns cached copies immediately, which significantly increases the speed of your site.
6. Ensure You Enabled Cache
Enabling cache allows the system to retrieve previously accessed items easily without having to go through the entire process every time. Caching extensions can be incorporated within Magento’s configuration file and other server tricks to amp up your Magento site speed. A cache extension you should use is Varnish reverse-proxy, which decreases page loading time.
7. Disable Unnecessary Logs
By default, Magento stores a lot through logs. Every time a customer visits your site, Magento automatically logs several records to your database. While logs can be a useful asset for retrieving and fixing problems, they also waste space and contribute to slow page load. Disabling the development level logging allows only critical errors to be written in the logs. This will inevitably reduce page load time and increase your Magento site speed.
8. Uninstall Unused Extensions
Extensions that are installed but not in use are a waste of space and resources. You should always be aware of the impact each extension has on your site, good or bad. You may have to make a trade-off between the added functionality of the extension and the speed of your server, but this is necessary decision to make. To see whether the extension holds relevant data, set up a test server for module installations. Afterwards, be sure to remove any extensions that do not hold relevant data in order to see improved performance.
9. Clean Out Your Database
In the same way that allowing your dishes to pile up creates a messy kitchen, allowing your data to clog creates a messy, slow website. Since you can get to a product a number of different ways, this can clog up the database and application. Cleaning your URL rewrites table will help boost performance by creating a smaller table to speed up the database. They also create less URLs, which helps speed up the router. So, always clean up your database for optimal results because unnecessary data is constantly piling up on your site and will result in a slower server.
10. Update to the Latest Version
While it seems like an obvious thing to do, many do not actually update the version of their store. Procrastination is not the answer! Always upgrade to the latest version of Magento to get more features and security fixes in order to improve your Magento site speed. Each Magento update allows your site to perform better by fixing any bugs and patches. The updates are made for you, so use them!
Conclusions
There are countless ways to boost your Magento site speed. As many of the tips above suggest, it’s best to keep speed in mind from the start. While we like to believe we are patient, research indicates that 40% of consumers will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Making fast performance a priority will undoubtedly create a much more enjoyable customer experience and your conversion rate will see the impact. Don’t lose current and future customers due to slow load time when there are endless ways to ensure you have a high performing website. You know what they say, time is money…so don’t waste it. Start revamping your Magento site today!
