5 Ways to Speed up Magento 2 to Improve Rank and Conversion

The speed of a Magento e-commerce website is very important for user experience. No one will like to shop on a slow website. It can infuriate and it could mean losing customers. Slow speed is a major contributing factor to cart abandonment.

Speed is also a determinant factor in search engine ranking. According to Maile Ohye from Google "2 seconds is the threshold for e-commerce website acceptability. At Google, we aim for under half a second". 

Below is how your website speed can affect your customer's shopping behavior:  

  •  47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less

  •  40% abandon a website that takes over 3 seconds to load

  •  79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from the same site again

  •  52% of online shoppers state that quick page loading is important to their site loyalty

  •  A 1-second delay (or 3 seconds of waiting) decreases customer satisfaction by about 16%

  •  44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online

Above are the reasons you need to increase the speed of your Magento e-commerce website. The truth is, if you are running on Magento 2, you will come across the problem of slow loading pages if it is not well optimized by a Magento development company. 

So, the question now is, how do you increase the speed of your website?

Below are 5 ways to speed up Magento 2 to improve rank and conversion

1. Make sure your third-party extension is up to date

Magento 2 has a lot of extensions to help you manage the functionality of your website. They are available for free and paid. But, some of them are not built for optimization and they can slow down your website. To avoid this, ensure that you inspect all your third-party extensions. Turn the modules on and off and clear the caches. Test page types such as front page, category pages, product pages, and checkout. If you turn the extensions off and your sites loads faster, then it means there are one or more extensions slowing down your website. Get in touch with the vendor to let them know about the issue and search for an alternative extension to use.

Again, using different third-party extensions from different vendors will generate conflicts on your website. This can lead to performance problems. 

2. Optimize your images

Image files are always big and if you load it on your website pages, it can slow down its loading speed and performance. You need to optimize all the images of your products on your website to improve its performance. To optimize your images for faster loading, follow the steps below.

  • Compress them before you upload into your Magento 2 store. For instance, you can use JPEG images for products and PNG for other images and your logo to enable your page to load faster.  
  • Use web resolution and not print resolution. Images are mostly designed in high resolution to fit different uses. But, you can reduce your images to the format you want. For instance, instead of using an image resolution of 4500 x 2800, you can use 1500 x 1020. 
  • Use an image compression with lossless quality to help you reduce the file size. 

3. Use a fast hosting server

The hosting server you use for your Magento 2 web store is very important to its performance. Use the best hosting plan you can afford. However, Magento 2 have the requirements you need to follow. This includes using 2G of RAM at the minimum and SSD. If you don't follow these guidelines, your website will not be fast.

In addition to that, your hosting server should offer a good connection time and response on each server requests. It should focus on time to first byte (TTFB) because it offers information on how fast the server response is provided to a browser request. It shows how fast your server executes a PHP code. It should be around 1s.

4. Enable flat categories and products

Magento 2 stores with different products face speed issues because there is a delay on the platform when reading catalog data from the database (read speed). However, Magento 2 solves this problem by providing an inbuilt feature to Enable Flat Category and Products in your store configuration. This will help you reduce the read time and make the database fast with MySQL query execution. To set it up, go to your Magento 2 store Admin and follow the instruction below: 

  • Click on stores and select configuration
  • Click on catalog, catalog again 

  • In the storefront page displayed, select "Yes" in "Use flat catalog category field"

  • Select "Yes" in "use flat catalog product".

5. Turn caching on

Most Magento 2 website slow loading speed is caused by turning off caching. This can be the work of a third-party developer, or an in-house designer who forgot to turn it on. This makes your website slow and unresponsive. You can turn on your cache by following the instructions below: 

  • Go to admin
  • Select cache management and check the settings 

It should all appear green if not enable it.

You can also enable full cache to get a better speed. There are two options to the full cache. i.e. built-in application and varnish. You can access the two from your admin by following the instruction below: 

  • Go to admin
  • Choose configuration
  • Choose advanced
  • Choose system and then full cache. 

When you use the built-in cache, it will improve your site performance by 0.5s which is still not the ideal. You can still get more by using the varnish natively. Varnish will give you the first byte in 0.1-0.2s.

Conclusion

Speed is essential to your sales and conversions as explained above. If you have issues with optimizing your website, Send us an email on info@pronkoconsulting.com message or call +353 85 85 32 401.