Advice from a Certified Magento Agency: How to Speed Up Magento 2

Five Ways To Speed Up Magento 2: Advice From a Certified Magento Agency

In the digital age, a staggering 22% of all global business is accomplished online. With a world GDP in the tens of trillions of dollars and e-commerce shares increasing by the day, the figure represents a huge cash value for today’s businesses. As an e-commerce provider, the undisputed core of your business is your online store.

Optimize Your E-Commerce Business

Boosting your e-commerce is more than just a way to obtain your piece of the online sales pie. Your online presence can aid in spreading your brand recognition, enhance your customer interactions, and increase potential client knowledge about the products or services you provide. For these reasons and more, it’s more important than ever to maintain an attractive, user-friendly online storefront.

Unfortunately, an ineffective online storefront produces the opposite effect, causing you to lose customers and revenue in the process. In fact, e-shopping carts’ rates steadily rose in past years to over 75%. For that reason, it’s more important than ever to provide a great customer experience in your online store – including speedy, efficient shopping. Here, our experts provide some critical tips for speeding up your Magento 2 store, including:

• Updating your Magento 2 version
• Auditing Magento 2 extensions
• Optimizing images
• Optimizing JavaScript and CSS minification
• Consulting with a Magento agency

1. Update Magento 2

First things first – you’ll want to ensure you have the most recent version of Magento 2 (or migrate to Magento 2 from Magento one if you haven’t already). The platform boasts a number of speed upgrades as compared to Magento 1 based on the developer’s own testing. Primarily, server response times for such essential features as adding a product to the cart, and guest checkout are vastly improved over Magento 1.

With multiple updates since the original 2015 version, Magento 2 has only gotten more efficient as time moves on. Recent versions eliminate the number of steps necessary to complete a checkout, therefore eliminating the page reloads notorious for slowing online sites. In addition, high volume sites can attain the benefit of healthy increases in the numbers of orders processed per hour, increasing revenue and improving user experience.

2. Audit Your Magento 2 Extensions

If your Magento 2 version is up to date, a likely culprit that may be slowing your e-commerce site are any third-party extensions you’ve employed. Even if you feel your site is running as expected, you should perform a regular audit of your third-party extensions; Magento 2 was developed to provide the vast majority of necessary functions out of the box and any extensions may actually hamper user ability to access your most key features. Worse, extensions can conflict with one another to further slow your site.

In a regular audit, endeavor to turn off each extension one at a time to assess its impact on functionality. Then, clear caches, turn the extension back on, and reassess. If you find an extension negatively affects your page’s speed, it’s likely time for another solution.

3. Optimize Site Images

Images are one of the primary factors that slow your Magento 2 e-commerce page. To avoid this effect, ensure all images use web resolution instead of print resolution, and scale each image to fit its eventual display space. If necessary, you can work with your site designer to obtain smaller images to fit your needs.

Another way to address image optimization is by using image compression. Image compression with lossless quality allows you to scale your image file sizes back by 50%. The resulting smaller sizes will ultimately serve to boost your page load speeds as well as optimize your server bandwidth.

4. Optimize JavaScript and CSS Minification

JavaScript and CSS are another leading culprit for slow e-commerce website speeds. Reducing JS/CSS file sizes can enhance your page load speeds, particularly on mobile devices. This process is known as code minification and involves optimizing the coding of these files to produce the same information without the use of excess coding language.

Unlike Magento 1, Magento 2 allows JS/CSS minification without the need for a third-party extension. Administrators must simply access the developer options within the advanced configurations tab of the admin panel and proceed to minify all JS/CSS features. In addition, you can merge all JS/CSS files into a condensed file for easier access and further load speed improvements.

5. Consult With a Magento Agency

While optimizing the superior speed available with Magento 2 is a more streamlined process than ever before, consulting with a Magento Agency like Forix can ensure you take all the steps necessary. In addition, Forix offers custom e-commerce solutions built to enhance all of Magento 2’s best features. The result is the premium user experience you need to scale your e-commerce enterprise.

For more information about page load speed and other Magento 2 features, reach out to our certified Magento development team today.