Increasing Magento eCommerce site speed

5 simple ways to increase your Magento eCommerce site speed

 

A good follow on from last week’s Magento SEO tips & tricks is tackling the issue of site speed. Site speed is (and always has been) a crucial factor for making conversions happen. It is imperative for site owners to consider the site user’s perspective. Why would people waste their time on your site when they can go somewhere faster and more convenient for them? Together, we can fight slow site speed and make a real difference #FirstWorldeCommerceProblems.

 

What is the importance of site speed?

Google uses site speed as a ranking factor. Google’s objective is to provide its users with the best experience. If your site is not complying with this then eventually you could face ranking lower (Google can detect this from a high bounce rate). Here’s what you can do about fixing this pesky issue:

 

1)      Updating to the latest version of Magento:

Although I did mention this in my last article, I cannot stress how important it is to keep your Magento store updated and running on the latest version. New releases often feature performance improvements and other patches your business can benefit from. And to be frank, there’s no excuse for not updating. How hard can it really be to update some software?

 

2)      Enable caching:

To reduce the number of operations required for each page request, enable caching. Browsers cache a lot of information, this is in preparation for when the visitor returns to the site. It saves things like stylesheets, JavaScript files, html files, images and other multimedia content to allow the site to load quicker. To do this on Magento go to System > Cache Management, hit “select all” then where you can see the drop down menu hit enable. Finalise this by pressing the submit button and Voila, job well done!

3)      Shrinking the size of image files:

Compressing image files is a good way to make it more suitable for web pages. You may find that large multimedia files slow down your page as they take time to load, which is basically drawing people away from your site. There are many free image optimisers that you can find online to do this, or simply do it yourself using Photoshop. A few methods for optimising images yourself are as follows:

• Crop unnecessary pixels from your images (like white-space).
• JPEG image files often contain metadata that is not necessary to keep. By stripping the metadata from an image you can typically cut 50% of its size.
• Compress high quality images down to the lowest acceptable level.

 

4)      Reduce code clutter:

Getting rid of unnecessary code can drastically show improvements in site speed. These can be things like spaces, commas and other unnecessary codes. Code comments also count as clutter, so once they’ve exceeded their use, it’s probably a good idea to get rid of them!

5)      Get rid of some Magento extensions:

Having too many Magento third party/community extensions can sometimes burden your page loading speed. This is purely due to the fact that many extensions include extra processing and database queries which has an adverse impact on overall performance.

 

Remember kids, it’s crucial to maintain a constant degree of speed across your entire site. Site speed can be your best friend if you don’t neglect it, as it may lead to having a competitive advantage, and what’s more competitive than the world we live in today?