Make it faster! How to speed up Magento 2 store

There are millions of different online shops, offering the whole bunch of products and services nowadays. It’s not enough just to have a webstore now to make customers buy. The owners of shops have to come up with attractive designs to grab buyers’ attention. The other crucial feature, that influences customer is speed. It is very important to have all the products loading fast, so potencial client does not get bored waiting, but turn into a real customer. Because of this, it is vital to make site as fast as attractive. By nature, Magento 2 is relatively fast platform. However, it may slow down because of wrong configuration, overload of third-party extensions and outdated versions. Check out this article if you are eager to know how to speed up Magento site.

So, here we begin…

Before speeding up your web store, we recommend you to test Magento speed of your  store by auditing it with Google Speed Insights. It is very user-friendly online tool that measures page’s speed. All you need is just to enter your website’s URL and tool will provide you with a detailed report. It will also include possible factors of slow performance and recommendations of how it can be possibly fixed.

By the way, double check the technical requirements for your Magento 2 online store to make sure all of them are taken into the consideration and are followed. Magento 2 operates better in certain conditions. So sometimes the solution might be just in following the requirements.

We provide you with some of the most helpful solutions for fixing the speed issues on Magento 2. We suggest trying each of those for the best performance as well as eliminating already existing and potential problems.

• Use Fast Hosting Provider to Speed Up Magento 

To make sure your Magento 2 web store works the fastest host it on a virtual private  server. The other good option could be hosting on the service which is Magento-based websites optimized. Usually, using cheap hostings will slow down the operation rates of Magento web stores. Here is some useful info: Magento 2 requires at least 2 GB RAM and 20 GB SSD storage. Keep in mind those requirements when choosing the hosting to avoid any possible speed performance issues. 

• Optimize it!

If you have some JS and CSS on your web store  it sometimes can also be the reason of why it works slower. So, just keep it in mind, when adding new features. Also ensure, that the features are optimized and make the store perform as quick as it can. For a better performance use the advanced developer settings to adjust them to a minimum size, so they  need fewer resources to run. You can set them using this hint:

Turn on Merge CSS and JavaScript in Stores -> Configuration -> Advanced -> Developer.

This option is already turned on in Production Mode for Magento 2.2 version. Also, you might find useful Performance Optimization Tool as one of Magento speed optimization extensions. The extension is designed to solve many optimization issues, including minifying JS and CSS.

• Let it cache, let it cache!

Once a visitor was at your page, your web store’s pages will accumulate in his browser’s cache memory. This way loading goes faster after the web store’s pages were opened at least once. Cache memory recalls fully-generated web pages that are already decoded and ready to display. All in all, the process takes less and the performance rate goes up, as well as it reduces the load on server. Once you speed up Magento, you get a better operating online store with a higher performance. Turn your Full Page Caching in Magento 2, following the steps:

Go to System -> Cache Management in Admin Panel and enable it.

• And… do some more optimization!

The images are an essential part of any online store. They not only attract the buyer’s attention, but also form first impression of the store visited. The more they are eye catching the better effect on the customer they have. However, you have to be aware about the extra weight they produce when it comes to performance. So here is a question: how to increase Magento site speed in this situation? Make sure all of your images are well optimized for web. One way to fix this is to ensure your images are all optimized for web usage. You can find plenty of the apps that help to optimize pictures, in way they weight less but still look nice on screen. Such optimization means adjusting image dimensions and resolution. We find TinyPNG a good option for such purpose.

• Minimize the use of 3rd Party Extensions

If there are any 3rd party extension on your Magento 2 online store that you don’t find really helpful – make sure you set them off. They don’t make much change to your online shop but add extra weight when are loading on a computer. You should also check if there are any Magento 2 designed alternatives. The less of third party extensions – the more lightweight your webstore is.

• And a little bit more of optimization!

One of the most significant elements of your Magento 2 store’s awesome performance is the speed of loading a database. The good solution for Magento database speed up is to enable the Flat Catalog option. To better understand how it works let’s take a closer look at how Magento 2 operates when it comes to database. Magento stores your catalog data in different tables. The required bits of information are called together when the catalog data is loaded. It takes up some time. You may use Flat Catalog to optimize the process. It creates a new table and fills it with the combined information from each table. As a result you have only one table to be loaded instead of many of them, so it loads way faster!

You can turn on the Flat Catalog in Admin Panel: Stores -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Storefront.

• Try running Dependency Injection Compilation

Dependency Injection Compilation in Magento 2 allows to shorten a web page loading time significantly. So here’s how it works:

Both classes and dependency injection auto-uploader are already implemented in Magento 2. You have to pay attention to di.xml – the file that stores dependency injections and runs creation of modifiers, classes, pseudo-classes, virtual types, etc. This file is parsed by default every time the page is loaded. However, parsing consumes a lot of time, which leads to worse speed performance of your store. Good, that there is a way to speed up Magento website – turn on Dependency Injection Compilation and speed up loading by running the command:

bin/magento setup:di:compile

You should run it in Production Mode.

So, basically, what Dependency Injection Compilation does is creating special cache where all specific classes are created automatically. So every time the customer visits the page after the first time all the data is delivered much faster. All in all, page loading rate increases in several times. This solution is very helpful, as it allows easily fasten the store operation.  

• Check your CDN Solution

A web service that hosts external resources of your Magento 2 webstore is called a Content Delivery Network (СDN). A CDN provider can process all the data faster than if it is stored on your server. Magento 2 is CDN-friendly, so there are no extra extensions needed.  Magento 2 also offers several CDN solutions to choose from.

• What about some Magento 2 Extensions?

Besides some extensions, that overload your page there are some designed to speed it up! You should check Amasty Full Page Cache Warmer and Mirasvit Cache Warmer for Magento 2.  These extensions improve Magento speed and make pages ready to be fully displayed right away even if it is the first time. We recently used Varnish Cache for one of our client’s web stores. The result was satisfying. However, keep in mind an extra cost of such solutions. 

• Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

Take into consideration, that most of the traffic nowadays come from mobile. You can not ignore it, if you want to boost your sales and attract more customers. That’s where accelerated mobile pages (AMP) comes into an action. AMP are web pages built particularly for mobile devices. Such pages are lightweight versions of the original web pages. These pages load super fast because they are not overwhelmed by any intensive scripting or features. You can find more about AMP at official Google’s Documentation for developers and take a look at AMP presentation. There you can also test your website for AMP.

 To sum it up,

You can not change the quantity of the shops available for the customers nowadays, but you can change the quality of yours, so the customer will prefer you over others. Keep in mind, that customers are more likely to switch to a different option instead of waiting for your page to load. A slow online shop will deter potential clients, no matter how awesome the products you sell are. Good news – now you know how to make your Magento 2 web store operate faster and make customers’ experience more remarkable.