Magento 2 is not a lightweight platform. With so many websites being migrated from Magento to Magento 2, the next big thing that store owners need to pay their attention is the website speed optimization. Thus, Magento owners must know to increase the speed of Magneto websites.
You might take it lightly but believe it or not, a slow website does affect your customer base and sales. User hates to spend a lot of time on one website. They might get frustrated and this frustration leads to fewer sales and a bad experience for the customers.
A slow Magento website is not good for your store. Google recognizes slow websites and ranks them lower in the search engine which is not good for your website at all.
In this blog, we will discuss some Magento 2 optimization techniques which will help you make your site fast and snappy to use.
Let us discuss them in brief here
1. Optimize Time to First Byte (TTFB)
One of the first steps you should take towards Magento 2 speed optimization is optimizing the TTFB. The TTFB is the time the website takes to load the HTML of a page. Google recommends having TTFB around 200ms. To reduce server response time Magento codebase needs to be inspected.
2. Magento Server Configuration
Optimizing server configuration includes choosing the right hosting and setting up server software. For better Magento 1 and Magento 2 performance optimization, do not pick a cheap option as it is the base of your online store, secure many resources.
3. Content Delivery Network
Content delivery network is a special system that can connect all cache servers. In addition to supported geographical proximity, CDN will take over the delivering web content and fasten page loading.
4. Image Optimization
Image is one very necessary factor to make your store’s performance more vivid. However, image size also plays an important role. If image size is too heavy to upload then it is one of the crucial reason for your site’s overload page. Thus, the image size should be reduced without affecting the quality much. You can use JPEG for product images and PNG for logos.
5. Reduce Server Response Time
By Magento 2 built-in cache functionality, your site’s response time is good with approximately 0.5s. But it is not an ideal time as Google expects. Due to that, Magento 2 supports Full Page Cache via varnish natively. Set up Varnish to get the first byte around 0.1-0.2 seconds.
6. Enable Compression
To enable deflate/gzip, first, your apache server must have the proper module enabled. Then look up at the settings in the .htaccess file in your Magento root folder and enable compression. Magento preinstalls it for you.
7. Configure Redis or Memcached
Redis is an in-memory distributed data structure store that is the database which improves Magento performance. It is a caching tool for the backend of Magento store. Redis optimizes Magento session storage, enables on-disk saves and improves website stability making your store faster and more reliable.
Memcached is an open-source general-purpose distributed memory caching system. It is used to speed up the dynamic database-driven websites by caching data and objects in RAM to reduce the number of times an external data source. Memcached is a worse alternative to Redis but we have given you both the options in case you have to choose and use Memcached due to some reasons.
8. Turn on Varnish Caching Tool
Varnish cache is a web application accelerator which is also known as caching HTTP reverse proxy. It works as an additional layer between the web server and the user. It will cache frequently requested files into Ram giving priority to most requested files. Varnish will bring in even more benefits when combined with a CDN upgrade. Varnish cache is really really fast. It is faster than any SSD and it will return cached files in a fraction of a second. The varnish is one of the major upgrades to your store.
9. Remove Unused Plugins
Magento 2 encourages developers to use a plugin instead. But for now both tools are present in the system and both of them can slow it down. We need to fix it. In Magento, event observers are attached to certain events and can dispatch them when needed with the help of Event manager. Today observers are pretty limited and some Magento extensions developers use events and their observers to extend basic Magento 2 functionality with custom made.
10. Upgrade to PHP7
Magento is powered by an interpreter engine called PHP7. PHP had a major upgrade before some time- PHP version 7. PHP7 runs faster than that the previous version PHP 5. Thus, you must upgrade your Magento to the recent version for better performance and speed.
11. Use HTML <Picture> Tag
HTML <picture> tag is most useful for responsive designs and pages with loads of images. But using this tag you can define multiple images sources within a single <picture>. This tag is useful when you want the browser to check the best image for a certain dimension. When you implement <picture> tag, you will have to teach other extensions on your store how to work with the <picture> tag.
12. Optimize your Magento Theme and Media
If a Magento theme is heavy then it will increase the loading time of the website even with a decent5 internet connection. Another disadvantage of having an unoptimized theme – it uses a lot of bandwidth. You can deal with a bad theme in two ways- firstly you can change your theme to a lighter theme especially if your theme is old. But if you like your theme and don’t wanna change it, the next best option is to change it yourself by optimizing the image sizes. When the image size will reduce, the site will load faster and performance will be better.
Conclusion
In the blog above, we have discussed twelve Magento 2 optimization techniques which will help you make your site fast and snappy to use. All these techniques are really going to help your website and it will load faster and give better performance if these techniques are implemented properly. Apart from these 12 points, there must be many other techniques as well. If you know other such techniques, please do share them with us in the comment section below. We would love to hear from you!