Magento 2 Speed Optimization Guide and Reduce Server Response Time

Magento 2 is not a lightweight platform. It was designed to serve thousands of customers at once. But you can end up with a website that is a pain to use and an eyesore to look at without proper optimization. Here is the ultimate guide to optimize and boost Magento performance.

Why is a slow Magento store bad? Well, you can tell it’s because users hate wasting their time. Their frustration leads to fewer sales and poor experience. But that isn’t all.

Google also discriminates against slow websites – slow Magento is bad for SEO. If your store takes its nice time to load, Google will notice and rank you below your competition. That generates a dangerous slope. In Google’s results page, a slow website will sink down and down, leading to fewer individuals finding your online business.

Even the most skilled web developers may miss the not-so-obvious settings to increase speed. Slow performance of admin is an awful thing to have. It makes the backend unbearable and sometimes making something as easy as saving a single product provides a troublesome experience.

In this blog post, we’ll offer you ways to improve the efficiency of your Magento store. Please note that it is important that you take a backup before you start working on your Magento website. Nothing is more frustrating than a broken site.

Eliminate unused extensions

To speed up Magento, it is best to remove unnecessary extensions rather than simply disabling them. If you disable an extension, it will still be in the database. It would not only improve the size of your database (DB), but it also contributes to DB’s reading time. So, keep your approach clear: DELETE it if you don’t need it. Once the unnecessary extension has been deleted, it will decrease the database reading time and help load the Magento admin panel quicker.

Delete inactive and outdated products

One should bear in mind that a fast store is a clean store. We can operationalize the front-end faster by caching and demonstrating only a limited set of products even if we have more than 10,000 items in the back-end, but we can’t escape their wrath. If the number of products continues to increase at the backend, your Magento admin panel may be slower, so it is best to remove unused products because each product would take some resources to slow Magento admin panel. Repeat this activity every few months to maintain the store’s speed.

Reindexing

Reindexing is one of the fundamental reason website administrators experience slow performance while saving a product. The Magento backend begins to reindex whenever you save a product, and since you have a lot of products, it will take some time to complete. This leads to unnecessary delays. Now, we can’t disable reindexing because keeping all products aligned is very important, but we can always disable auto-updates from the admin. Instead, reindexing can be scheduled via shell. Magento offers very powerful CLI tools, so why not use them.

This can be set up via CRON to run somewhere during off-peak times, so the load it causes does not impact visitors.

Tuning Up the Database

Database tuning plays a significant role in fine-tuning the performance of the Magento admin board and thus enhance the speed. You may need some expertise for this. It’s not that difficult either, though. You can simply use a tuner script. Once you have downloaded it, you can execute it. It will guide you on the things you need to do.

Clear the Cache

The cache is very essential as far as any web application is concerned, so a web server does not have to process the same request over and over again. A fair amount of memory and execution time can be saved by using the cache. However, if you don’t clean your cache containers carefully, this gets a little out of control. Magento has distinctive caching methods that use both disk and database to maintain everything clean. It is essential to avoid overloading of the cache folder.

There is another folder, i.e. session, along with cache, which also needs to be cleared. Just like the cache, you need to prevent it from expanding too much.

Sessions are stored in the database (DB) in some instances. You need to truncate the core session table from DB.

Cache tables in the database may also be challenging. So, keeping core cache_% table empty is a good idea. These tables can expand very fast. As a consequence, the database becomes bloated and the output slows down.

To make it simpler, here is a sample PHP script that can help you understand the above-mentioned actions.

Optimize Images

Images are a must-have asset for eCommerce businesses, but optimizing and compressing pictures is of utmost significance as it has a direct impact on page weight. The CDN support team at your eCommerce store can assist with this. Otherwise, you can go to the Google PageSpeed server extension.

Varnish for full page caching

Implementing Varnish cache is an essential element of your Magento 2 load time optimization method as it can speed up your mobile web loading acceleration more than 25x.

Varnish cache is a fast cache technology that functions as a temporary storage unit which makes a copy of your eCommerce store’s web pages. When a request is sent to make a web page, the application is first directed to the Varnish server. Rendering pages from the Varnish server requires only a few milliseconds, which considerably decreases the load time (time varies depending on the hardware capacity).

Varnish cache can be used as a mechanism for failover, caching inverse HTTP proxy, or load balancer. Using Varnish cache, you can decrease the number of web servers you depend on to support your website and accelerate response time.

All these aforementioned steps are an apt guide on how to optimize the performance of your Magento 2 eCommerce.

Magento 2 Performance Optimization

Identifying and solving bottlenecks will create an enormous difference in the processing of your data. Using full-page cache and varnish will also enhance the speed of your website and boost HTTP traffic. You should always use Magento on your live server’s production mode, no excuses. Use minification to reduce the size of CSS and JS files, a smaller file will both download quicker and use less bandwidth.

Allow flat tables to minimize requests for databases and enhance response time for databases. Use Magento 2 speed optimization extension, optimize your images and, if possible, use a CDN. Set indexers to be updated on the schedule and allow Magento CRON.