How to optimize your Magento store
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This white paper discusses various methods for optimizing performance on Magento, an ecommerce platform. It begins with basic optimizations like minifying files, optimizing images, enabling caching and gzip compression. More advanced techniques include implementing memcached, Redis and Varnish caching, using a content delivery network, optimizing the database with measures like flat categories and products. The paper provides details on implementing each technique and the benefits to Magento performance. Key contacts at the authoring company RetailOn are provided.
How to optimize your Magento store
- 1. Magento Performance Optimization WHITE PAPER BY RETAILON WHITE PAPER BY RETAILON
- 2. 1 Introduction Magento is the most successful ecommerce platforms globally accepted by developers and eCommerce owners. Despite its popularity Magento is a quite heavy CMS and runs slowly if right configuration and settings are not applied. This is because these settings are not quite obvious and missed by even experienced web developers who are not so familiar with Magento. There are several methods that can be applied to enhance Magento’s performance and other PHP based CMS systems. These enhancements start from settings within Magento and go all the way to server/hosting settings. The few methods that are relatively easier ones and increase the Magento page-load speed significantly are:: 2 BASIC PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION 2.1Reduce the size of file transfer between browser & web server A best approach to boost Magento performance is by reducing file transfer between browser and web server. 2.2Minify JavaScript and CSS: There are many online tools available to minify Javascript and CSS jscompress.com,minifyJavascript.com,csscompressor.com,minifycss.co m.Compressing the Javascript and CSS can set aside many bytes of data and reduces downloading, parsing and execution time Quicker download times for your users. This helps in achieving the following pointers: Reduce bandwidth consumption of your website. Reduce number of HTTP requests on your server by combining many Javascript files into one compressed file, thus reducing the server load and allowing more visitors to access your website. Speed up script execution times by reducing comments and whitespace, which are not needed for Javascript &CSS execution and thus reducing file size.
- 3. 2.3Optimize Images by resizing them: If you want to your site to load faster and have your images still retain their quality, you’ll need to optimize your images before you upload them to your site. Select a suitable image file format and compress the images using image compressor to lessen the bandwidth between browser and web server. There are several image compression tools offered online such as; imageoptimizer.net, hjpeg-optimizer.com, JPEGMini.com etc. 2.4Enable GZIP compression You can curb the number of bytes sent over the network considerably by using GZIP compression that cuts down the size of HTML, CSS, and Javascript files sent over the network by up to 75% and reduces download time drastically. 2.5Lessen the Number of HTTP Requests By merging the CSS and Javascript, you can reduce HTTP request. To reduce HTTP requests and uphold a high-quality web page at the same time. - Combine Javascript and Combine CSS files, an inbuilt feature of Magento. - Combine Javascript and Combine CSS files: It is inbuilt feature of magento. Go to System > Configuration > Advanced > Developer- Set Javascript settings and CSS Settings as Yes 2.6Combine images using CSS sprites: By using CSS sprites, number of images can be brought down by combining them into as less number of files as possible. It will reduce the server requests and will bring down the number of bytes downloaded by a webpage.
- 4. 2.7Expires Headers or Cache control headers By using the expire headers or cache control headers, the number of HTTP requests and its size can be reduced to faster page load. 2.8Enable Apache KeepAlives Apache KeepAlives keeps the communication between server and browser up and running when your Magento is hosted on a shared server. It is recommended to keep it running on server so that your user’s browser and server do not loose the communication. 2.9Reduce the number of DOM elements High numbers of DOM elements make the page more complicated and increase the page size. This results in increased download time and slower access to Javascript making the webpage load slower. Examine the alternative to bring down the DOM elements. There are many free tools available like DOMMonster, DOMinspector to inspect your web page and offer suggestions for enhancement. The screen shots given below have been taken using the DOM Monster tool. This is an instance of a healthy web page with a less number of DOM elements. Example YSlow –
- 5. YSlow fetches all data about the page and generates a grade for each rule, which generates the overall grade. Yslow offers great help to design complete layout with superb load speed. Grids.css can help you to design responsive web page where as fonts.css and reset.css assists you to strip away the browser’s default formatting”. 2.10 Place CSS calls at top of the page and JS calls at the bottom Always place CSS calls at top of the page and Java Scripts calls at the bottom as it assists to boost the progressive rendering in several browsers, thus increasing Page load speed.
- 6. 3 ADVANCE PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION 3.1Implement Required Caching Mechanisms Enable all Magento caching mechanism by enabling all of the accessible cache from the Magento admin panel (System –> Cache Management). 3.2Implement opcode cache mechanism Memcache is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. This caching mechanism assists to get better Magento heavy traffic hits on your database by caching data away from it. Magento supports Memcache is not enabled by default it has to be enabled via its configuration file, start the service, and restart Apache (APC, accelerator, xcache, etc) 3.3Enable Memcache mechanism Memcache is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. This caching mechanism assists to get better Magento heavy traffic hits on your database by caching data away from it. Magento supports Memcache is not enabled by default it has to be enabled via its configuration file, start the service, and restart Apache. 3.4Implement Redis cache There are problems while implementing Two Levels Cache Backend (i.e. to use Memcache together with the database). Redis is an appropriate alternative to resolve this problem. “Redis is an Open Source, BSD licensed, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets.” It is measured as one of the superior and most efficient caching mechanisms for Magento.
- 7. Given below editions support Redis session and back end caching: Enterprise Edition (EE) 1.13 and later Community Edition (CE) 1.9 3.5Implement “Varnish caching” Varnish is a HTTP accelerator; it plays a role of load balancer. It caches the created HTML from a web page and serves it to a user sooner than making a call to the Magento Framework. Hence, it reduces the load time and decreases the response time extremely well. 3.6Enable MySQL Query Caching MySQL has its own “query cache”, which is quite supportive to optimize the MySQL performance. It helps in generating dynamic pages and content while considerably enhancing the performance. MySQL stores the query text and its results in its cache and when the same query is fired, results are made available quickly. 3.7Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) CDN helps to reduces server load, by serving the static content like images, CSS files or Javascript files through a network of servers intimately located to your customers. A CDN can truly perk up the user experience on the web site. Some of the free CDN website like Cloudflare.com 3.8Optimize Performance Through Magento Panel Keep logging turn off Magento logging mechanism is turned ON, It can simply be turned off from the admin panel. Go to System > Configuration > Advanced > Mage Log > Set Disable and Save Turn Compilation On
- 8. This option let you to compile all files of a Magento installation in order to generate a single include path to enhance performance”. To enable, Go to “System” > “Tools” > “Compilation” and click on the “Run Compilation Process” button. To use this tool, directory includes and the file includes/config.php both must be writable. 3.9Enable Flat Categories and Products As each product or category information is stored in multiple tables, each time a product or category page is requested, a large join query is prepared to collect all the pieces of information and form a web page. Enabling the Flat Catalog generates these pages by using a lone DB query from a sole DB table. This considerably reduces the bottleneck performance of loading a product/category page. System > Configuration >Catalog Panel > Catalogue > Frontend > you will see two options “Use Flat Catalog Product” and “Use Flat Catalog Category”. Set both to Yes.
- 9. 4 Key Contacts: Ramesh Kumar CEO & Founder Skype: Ramesh.RetailOn Email: Ramesh@RetailOn.net Whatsapp & Mobile: +91 9739721850 https://www.facebook.com/ramesh.kumar1 4th Floor, 535 Fifth Avenue, New York City, New York 10017, United States Pragyan Priyadarshani COO & Cofounder Skype: Priya.RetailOn Email: Priya@RetailOn.net Whatsapp & Mobile: +91 9538374000 https://www.linkedin.com/in/pragyanpriyadarshani RetailOn, 3rd Floor, 2nd Block, HM Tech Park, Whitefield, Bangalore – 560066