How to increase the performance and efficiency of Magento 2
What Are the Best Ways to Speed up Magento 2? Many online stores told us that their magento 2 site is faster than magento 1 site. So migrating magento 1 to 2 is the answer?
Users don't like slow sites, so your objective should always be to look for ways to speed up. Poor performance has a number of causes. The best course of action is to locate bottlenecks and resolve all technical issues. Some issues may seem insignificant, but tiny delays can lead to snowball, causing major issues for you and your customers — including frustration, lost revenue, and an awful brand image.
Why is having a fast site so important?
Performance lags lead to abandonment of the site, high bounce rates, low conversion rates and bad customer retention. Slow load times slow down Google's crawler, which hurts crawl effectiveness and leads to fewer pages being indexed.
4 easy steps you can take to speed up Magento 2
There are still a lot of people who have Magento 1 version. The end of Magento 1 support is less than a year away — it is scheduled for June 2020. If you reading this, and you're still on Magento 1, let us see what you might be missing.
Step 1 — Upgrade to Magento 2 if you’re still running Magento 1
Magento 2 was published in November 2015 and has since been adopted by merchants ranging from startups to established corporations. There are some challenges with the migration of Magento 2. But the performance advantages are difficult to overcome. Magento has released a white paper titled "Site Performance and Scalability Optimizations "— which involves detailed explanations of variations in software design, caching and other optimizations. The Magento team looked at small and large marchant scenario in the white paper.
Always update to the latest version of Magento for maximum performance
Keep in mind that Magento 2.0 is not the latest version. The recent and most optimized version is 2.3.2—which is faster than 2.0. Below are some of the improvements.
- Magento 2.3.2 has a function that loads scripts last.
All non-critical JavaScript code is relocated to the bottom of the storefront pages, which speeds up page rendering and allows users to view the full page sooner while non-essential elements remain inactive.
To enable this performance enhancement, you must navigate to Stores > Configuration > Developer > Java Script Settings and enable the JS code to be moved to the bottom of the page option.
- 2.3.2 Has a better image slider that allows pictures to be loaded faster.
Product images are loaded as rapidly as the contents of other pages. Although the product page loaded rapidly in past releases, the product images required two to four extra seconds to be fully loaded.
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2.3.2 provides significant improvements in the response time of the storefront page
The page reaction times for catalog, search and advanced search pages have been significantly improved under high loads.
If you're running the recent version of Magento 2, let's look at how you can make it even faster. These are Magento's most powerful performance optimization tips.
Step 2 — Make sure you’re following the Magento Performance Best Practices
Magento 2 has a special section called Performance Best Practices. This is an invaluable resource for improving page speed. This involves suggestions for hardware / software, as well as best practices for setting up your shop. A lot is addressed in this guide, so we're going to give you some highlights and easy fixes that you can make today, all handpicked by our development team.
Caches
Magento recommends that all caches be turned on from the System > Tools > Cache Management page. In specific, they strongly suggest the use of Varnish. Varnish Cache is an open source web application accelerator that allows you to reduce server response time and bandwidth consumption. We're going to speak about other caching alternatives in Step 4.
Additional tips from Magento:
Magento considers JavaScript (JS) Bundling to be a essential instrument for speeding up Magento. Merging JS resources results in faster page performance, fewer server requests, and support for browser cache files. However, as the Magento documentation notes, "this setting is not recommended for stores where the first page load time is extremely critical, as all JS content will be loaded on the first call."
Magento also offers these tips:
- Use tools from third parties for minification and bundling (like r.js). Magento's built-in mechanisms are not optimal and are shipped as fallback alternatives.
- Activation of the HTTP2 protocol can be a good solution to using JS bundling. The protocol offers almost the same advantages.
- Magento does not suggest using deprecated configurations such as combining JS and CSS files, as they were designed for synchronously loaded JS only in the HEAD section of the page. Using this method may cause bundling and require JS logic to function incorrectly
Step 3 — Choose the right hosting provider and plan
There are things that you can skimp on, but hosting isn't one of them. There's no way you can get a quick site with a inexpensive hosting supplier. Make sure you choose a solid-state (SSD) hard drive hosting plan and at least 2 GB of RAM.
There are four main types of web hosting options-
- Shared Server Hosting – A beginner’s best friend- Shared hosting is when your website is located on a server that also hosts other websites. This is the perfect place for people just starting out. Examples include Nexcess, Lexiconn, ZeroLag.
- Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting – Shared hosting on steroids- VPS is similar to shared hosting because all sites are hosted on a single physical server. However, VPS hosting providers can house various virtual machines. Examples of VPS hosting are Amazon Lightsail, Microsoft Azure, and IBM VPS.
- Dedicated Server Hosting – Enterprise-level hosting- Dedicated hosting is when you've got a server on your own. The greatest benefit is that you have complete control of everything. However, this type of hosting is very costly, and if you're going for cheap, you're going to have more issues than you've been attempting to fix.
- Cloud Server Hosting – Web hosting of the future- Cloud hosting is similar to VPS, except websites are hosted on a network of computers. You don't have to worry about the place of the server or about ping. This is the best choice if you're looking to scale rapidly, because you can just subscribe to a distinct plan and immediately get more resources, and subsequently more speed. Examples of cloud hosting are Amazon Web Services and Digital Ocean.
Step 4 — Get a site audit to identify bottlenecks
Magento Development Agency, or your own IT team, are the best candidates for site auditing. There are so many things that could cause bottlenecks, such as number of server requests, page weight, lazy page features, lazy image loading, third party extensions, and poorly written or unoptimized code.
What are the most common bottlenecks and how do we solve them?
Disable core modules you don’t use
The first suggestion is disabling unused core modules. These include:
- Extra languages
- Offline shipment and payments
- Backup, Captcha, Persistent, RSS
- MSRP, Send Friend, Weee
- Multishipping, Checkout agreements
- Product types
- And others, depending on your store
Disable unnecessary features
Max suggests removing unnecessary features such as observer reports, plugins, and design components. Event reports are generated for all kinds of user actions, such as adding products to the cart, viewing certain products, etc. You can speed up Magento 2 by simply disabling these reports
Check third party extensions and modules
The requirements of the Magento merchants are genuine. Users want more features, and sometimes they feel like a catch-up game. Third party extensions and modules make wonders about workflows and rapidly process and automate certain procedures. They can, however, crush the performance of your site because of how they have been implemented.