With the B2B eCommerce sales predicted to hit $3 trillion by 2024, you are left with no other option than to be on the cutting edge with your eCommerce website. In this competitive scenario, performance optimization of your Magento store gains paramount importance.
Keeping in mind that you are presenting your website content to customers who are impatient enough to leave your slow site that exceeds 3 seconds to load, it’s high time for you to weigh the measures that could rectify these issues. Your faster online storefront will keep your customers hooked, let them explore everything that you offer.
If you are thinking hard to find ways to leverage your website speed, do consider the following factors:
- TTFB Optimization
- Effective Utilization of PWA
- MySQL Configuration
- Enable Content Delivery Network
- Image Optimization
- Enable Varnish Cache Tool
- Eliminate Unwanted Extensions
As you read along, you will get a better idea about how these factors come alive while curating your fully optimized eCommerce website.
How to Host an Optimal Magento Store?
1. TTFB Optimization
As a significant website speed metrics, Time to First Byte (TTFB) shows the web server’s responsiveness, indicating the time taken between the HTTP request made by the customer and receiving the first byte of the data. You can use Magento 2 Profiler to analyze the performance of your eCommerce website and take adequate steps for TTFB optimization.
The higher the TTFB, the slower will be your Magento store. To lower this server response time, scanning your Magento codebase is essential. TTFB depends on the number of code that has to be run by the PHP interpreter. Being an intricate eCommerce platform, Magento 2 might have numerous lines of code and a TTFB audit is recommended to have a clear insight of each code.
Its optimization is mainly required for pages including customer profiles, cart, and checkout, which does not benefit from the built-in full page cache enabled by Magento 2 as opposed to other pages. Leveraging browser cache can result in a reduced TTFB as it lowers the web server load, thereby lessening the time to load your web pages.
2. Effective Utilization of PWA
PWA in Magento 2 utilizes JavaScript. Through PWA, pages load much faster due to three main reasons:
- Reduced traffic of data
- Multiple cache management
- Saving offline user-generated data
The JS code facilitates the offline operations of the app with more agility than the native apps. Thanks to the service workers, browser-level caching enables PWAs to operate at a faster pace. Through the service workers, PWAs precache sections of a webpage to load immediately when the customer clicks on it again.
The cross-platform compatibility of PWA ensures its smooth functioning across various devices and browsers using a single web codebase. This eliminates the need for you to develop different apps for each platform. Lazy loading of files is possible on your website that would ease the page load times as the customer navigates through different web pages. Your eCommerce website will also cache API call responses when a customer visits your site, which will lower the server load.
Additionally, the PWA site’s app icon can be added directly to the home screen. Your eCommerce website can be accessed directly without the need for a browser, automatically increasing user engagement.
3. MySQL Configuration
With large databases that involve greater activities, performance tuning is imperative. Tweaking your MySQL setting becomes significant for increasing the speed of the database server. If your MySQL database is slow, try to understand its cause, and in case you are unsure about its origin, it is advisable to change only one setting at a time.
Creating accurate indexes is essential for MySQL optimization. The right index enhances the query performance as it reduces the amount of data that must be scanned, speeding up access in the database. The configurable settings of MySQL can be put to use efficiently to improve website behavior and performance. You cannot overlook these settings and use it in default mode, since by default, MySQL is adjusted for small-scale development installations.
Moreover, the database environment can also be affected by MySQL glitches, increased traffic, or application bugs. A quick solution to such issues is necessary before it damages the performance of your Magento store. Monitoring tools like MySQL Enterprise Monitor are available that monitor the performance and analyze any potential threats so that you will be prepared. With such tools, operational visibility comes into effect that helps in troubleshooting.
4. Enable Content Delivery Network
By caching files on remote servers and facilitating faster delivery of contents, the Content Delivery Network (CDN) enhances the user experience especially when you have wider target customers spanning all over the world. Lessening the load of web servers, CDN delivers static content like stylesheets, JavaScript files, CSS files, images, and many more through the servers that are nearer to your customer’s location, considerably reducing the store response time.
This interlinked system of cache servers supports geographical proximity as a criterion for delivering content. From redirecting the request from the original server to the nearest server of the customer, CDN provides the cached content at a lightning speed. CDN is best suited to handle your eCommerce website when there is a surge in traffic by maintaining server infrastructure across the globe.
The dynamic capacity and enhanced infrastructure that CDN offers lower the bandwidth stress by allowing you to restrict the data flow when fulfilling the data requests of the customers. This will, in turn, prevent website crashes during heavy online traffic. Additionally, content changes are also constantly updated as the CDN regularly interacts with the original server.
5. Image Optimization
With media being one of the foremost factors of your eCommerce website, optimizing the images plays an important role. Make sure that the files you upload will not go beyond the image requirements and don’t forget to minify large images before uploading. JPEG format is appropriate for product images, while PNG or SVG is best suited for logo and layout.
Magento 2 image sizes focus on resultative Magento 2 image compression. Images with large sizes can make your eCommerce website heavy, affecting its speed. Magento 2 offers image optimization extensions and other tools to compress images without compromising on their quality. Command-line tools do away with decoding the image, rather they rearrange the compressed data. This does not leave space for degradation of the image quality, while not putting stress on the website load.
Fastly Image Optimization (Fastly IO) of Magento 2 allows image optimization and manipulation in real-time that strengthens image delivery. After you configure Fastly IO, its following features will come in handy:
- Deep image optimization
- Adaptive pixel ratios
- Force lossy conversion
- Common image format support (JPEG, PNG, GIF)
Depending on the configuration settings, VCL code is inserted by Fastly IO snippet for optimizing images, facilitating faster delivery of product images.
6. Enable Varnish Cache Tool
Being an HTTP accelerator, Varnish cache improves the speed of web pages of your Magento store that are highly content-driven. By developing fragment files, Magento Varnish reduces the duration and consumption of network bandwidth for any imminent requests.
After the customer visits your eCommerce website, Varnish builds a replica of what has been delivered to that customer. As a result, if any customer visits your web page, the previous request will be identified by the proxy, and delivers the cached version within no time, doubling the website performance. Delivering a cached version proves to be faster than processing a request from scratch.
Moreover, by enabling Varnish cache, server space can be reduced considerably, aiding you to design your platform effectively, while also relieving you from the expenditure incurred from any on-premise hardware. The Varnished cache can be employed for a variety of roles to optimize the website performance:
- Load balancing
- Failover system
- Reverse proxy cache
7. Eliminate Unwanted Extensions
Using extensions leads to loading more HTTP requests, JavaScript files, and CSS sheets. So, despite extensions enhancing your website functionalities, employing countless extensions can have a deteriorating effect on your website speed. Additionally, some third-party extensions might contain bugs that can further lower the website performance. Be wary of that as well.
All the extensions that you have enabled will use up your resources to some extent. In case such extensions are not configured properly, the TTFB will be slowed down. A third-party extension audit will help you to look through the extensions and remove those that have not been proven worthy.
You can understand its impact through a simple process:
- Try disabling the extensions one at a time
- Check all the important pages like the homepage, product pages, and so on to inspect any considerable changes
- Take a note of the differences in speed
- Identify the ones that are time-consuming and remove them
Find the Right Developers for Magento Performance Optimization
Once you have analyzed the ways to optimize the performance of your Magento eCommerce store, you need to get in touch with the right developers to help you host an online storefront that would exceed your expectations. So, while hiring developers, make sure you tick off everything from the following checklist:
- Right expertise
- Hands-on experience
- Familiar with all eCommerce trends
- Satisfactory reviews and testimonials
- Good communicator
DCKAP- Your Ultimate Solution
Being a certified Magento solutions partner, our 30+ certified developers at DCKAP will help you curate your desired Magento storefront. With the right expertise, our 15+ years of experience has resulted in rewarding success stories. Our team of in-house developers is all eyes and ears to communicate with you at each turn. With DCKAP, you can gear up your optimal eCommerce website that would well boost your competitive positioning.