If you are clued up on SEO, you should know that site speed is a factor Google considers when ranking your website. Therefore if your Magento website is taking ages to load, this could have a negative effect on its ranking in relevant searches. Not only that but it may cause you to lose customers, who will be clicking off your website and using a competitor’s faster website instead. In this article we aim to explain why your Magento website may be running slow and how you can go about tackling the problem.
Is your slow Magento website driving you crazy? Check out our top tips below for speeding it up!
Why is my Magento site so slow?
If you have typed the question above into Google, it is likely that you were flooded with web pages complaining about the ecommerce platform being slow and affecting user experience. This is due to the fact that Magento is a heavy ecommerce platform. When it was created, the developer prioritised flexibility above all, but unfortunately this benefit came at a price.
All hope is not lost though, as there are ways you can optimise your Magento ecommerce store to make it load and run faster. Read through this article, note down the points mentioned and send them to your web developer, explaining what needs to be done.
Magento site loading slow
One of the top reasons for Magento sites loading slowly is because they do not have Caching activated. Turning on this feature will single handedly speed up your Magento website. This can be found in the settings section of your admin panel.
Manual indexing
If your website’s indexes have not been updated manually then this will contribute to your Magento site loading slowly. This is due to the fact that every time a user tries to load a page, your Magento site will have to figure out a number of calculations in order to complete the task. Make sure you manually updated your websites indexes through the admin panel.
Turn on compilation
Another great way to improve page loading times it to turn compilation on. When you compile Magento’s files, you will essentially be grouping them into blocks of HTML that are more easily accessible. According to the experts behind Magento, compiling your files can provide you with between 25 and 50 per cent better performance, depending on the page requested.
Combine CSS and JavaScript
Something you may also want to consider doing is combining your CSS and JavaScript files. This will significantly improve your sites performance and browser rendering time.
Magento running very slow
Is your Magento website running slow? It may be because your memory limit is too low. Configure this in the settings section of your admin panel. The memory limit dictates the amount of memory you can dedicate to PHP processes. It is important to make sure that this is greater than 128 mb as Magento uses up a lot of memory. Increasing the memory limit will help your site to perform operations quicker.
Flatten your products and categories
Something you may also want to consider doing is flattening your products and categories. Magento uses an EAV database module. This means that each product or category you add has information that spreads throughout many different tables. Every time a product page or category page is requested, your Magento site has to join all of this information together from each table. As you can imagine, this can take quite a long time. By flattening your catalog, you are allowing Magento to gather the information it needs from one single place, boosting speed and performance.
Has the core been hacked?
When a developer ‘hacks the core’ it means they have manually overwritten some of Magento’s files. Although they may have done this to customise your Magento website, the problem is that hacking the core can actually slow it down significantly. If you are having issues with your Magento site’s speed, find out if the core has been hacked.
Upgrading hosting
If you find Magento web service slow, you may want to consider finding a new host that specialises in hosting Magento ecommerce stores. Look out for a host that is optimised for MySQL and uses a PHP accelerator like APC, ZendOptimizer+ or Xcache. It is also a good idea to make sure your host is in the country where the majority of your customers are from.
Plugins
Although plugins (also known as modules) can be great for improving the functionality of your Magento ecommerce store, they can also cause it to slow down. If you are looking to speed up your site, we recommend going through your plugins and checking that you do actually need to use them all. If there are any plugins that are not adding value to your site in any way, make sure they are disabled and removed.
Updates
Something that may sound obvious, but is often forgotten is updating Magento when new versions are released. The Magento Core team does not just make new versions for the sake of it. They make them to boost the performance of your site, add new features and fix existing bugs. Magento admin running slow? This could be because you are using an outdated version. Ensure you are up to date before making any of the changes outlined above.
Conclusion
Although Magento is never going to be the fastest ecommerce platform in the world, with knowledge, time and effort, it is possible to make a Magento website load and run more quickly. For more information on how to boost your Magento website’s page loading times and performance get in touch with one of our experienced Magento developers on 0161 762 4920.
