Opting for Magento 2 has become a go-to option for many companies and brands more than ever. Companies are migrating from Magento to Magento 2 because there is no support available for Magento.
However, many businesses face issues with optimizing Magento 2 to get the best performance. And if you are one of them, this blog will help you understand the required methods to run your Magento 2 website successfully. You may also want to hire Magento developer who can fulfill all the requirements discussed here.
What are the Reasons for Magento 2 Not Performing Smoothly?
The primary reason for Magento 2 not giving optimal performance is its speed. However, a few other reasons may add up to the list. They are as follows:
- The hardware is inefficient and slow.
- There are no proper extensions.
- Configurations are not optimized.
- There are improper customizations.
- Magento caching is disabled.
- Lack of the correct plugins.
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What are the Best Practices to Optimize Your Magento 2 Website?
Did you know that with every additional second your website takes to load, the website conversion rate reduces by an average of 4.42%? The same thing might happen to your website, and we don’t want that! You may rely on a Magento 2 development company to fix your website issues as per the best practices shared below:
Make Your Hosting Reliable
Before opting for a low-cost hosting service provider, ensure that it is proper for your Magento 2 store as discussed in the following points:
- The hosting provider must be compatible with the Magento 2 version.
- It must meet the criteria such as MySQL 5.6 and higher (database system), PHP 7.0, PCI Compliance (Payment Card Industry), and Apache 2.x/ NGINX/ Litespeed (web server software).
- The server must guarantee secure shopping for customers and be up to date with the latest software.
- Choose the nearest server location to your target audience. It will give faster response times.
- Have regular server backups to ensure the security of your and your customer’s data.
- Have robust security measures, including firewalls, protection against DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial-of-Service), and intrusion detection systems.
Setup a Content Delivery Network Plan
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) helps transfer static content using a regional servers group. These servers ensure that your users get faster delivery of online content, including accessing HTML pages, images, and JS/CSS files.
Choosing a CDN plan is favorable for businesses with an international user base. However, this would require you to spread the servers across various parts of the world so that your customers get the needed speed.
Consider Varnish Caching
Varnish is designed to accelerate dynamic pages and help boost the Magento 2 store’s performance. It works on the fragments files stored in memory, eliminating the network bandwidth and time needed for the subsequent requests.
Thus, it runs like a reverse proxy server that seizes and caches content from the origin server to present the cached content to users. Such caching enables faster retrieval of content for customers, improving the overall page load time.
Avoid JavaScript bundling
JavaScript or JS bundling is a process of limiting HTTP requests by clustering separate files. As a result, only a few bundles are loaded instead of many JS files, improving the page speed of your website.
While this approach might be a temporary fix, it would hinder your website’s performance. The reason is when you bundle files through JS bundling, you will end up with large JavaScript files. Besides, JS bundling will also impact the speed of your Magento 2 site. So, you must avoid it to ensure that your website runs smoothly.
Make Use of ElasticSearch
Elasticsearch enables faster search results and pages to product catalogs for business owners listing many products in their stores. It does so by providing a quick web content search, as the indexing service doesn’t search the entire database to match results.
Elasticsearch considers many factors while providing relevant search results. These include search query terms, products, and descriptions. The good news is that ElasticSearch is a default extension from Magento 2.4.x versions. For previous versions, you can configure it through these steps:
- Go to Stores > Settings > Configuration.
- Navigate to Catalog > Catalog > Catalog Search.
- Select ‘Elasticsearch’ from the Search Engine.
- Click ‘Save Config.’
Merge CSS with JavaScript
You can merge and minify the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JS files to minimize the number of requests. As a result, the webpage becomes lighter and reduces the time needed to load.
To enable this, follow the below steps:
- Go to Stores.
- Navigate to Configuration > Advanced > Developer JavaScript Settings.
- Select ‘Yes’ for ‘Merge JavaScript Files’ and ‘Minify JavaScript Files.’
Convert Magento 2 into PWA
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are designed to mimic a mobile app and make the user experience better. Through the PWA technology, website interactions become more responsive as they provide frictionless scrolling and smooth animations.
And this can be backed by reports from Forbes, per which page views increased by around 134% when brands adopted PWAs. You can also improve your website page views by consulting a Magento 2 development company that offers you a suitable solution.
Optimize Product Images
When it comes to your website’s performance, product images play a vital role. If you use heavy images, it will result in a slower load time, and your customers will have to wait longer. So, you must ensure that the images you use on your Magento 2 website are highly optimized with a proper quality-size ratio.
Hence, you may want to compress the images (without losing their quality) before publishing them on the web pages. For product images, you can use JPEG, and for layout or the logo, they can use PNG or SVG formats.
Wrapping Up
You can follow the best practices discussed in the above blog and set your Magento 2 website for success. To ensure that your Magento 2 website is fully optimized, you can also hire Magento developer who will give you more tailored solutions.
In this fast-paced world, customers need everything in the blink of an eye! So, making your Magento 2 store highly efficient will result in more happy customers and improved sales conversions.
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