When you are running an eCommerce business one of the things that affect your success more than anything is the user experience on your online store. For one, to be able to take advantage of the amazing features and tools provided by Magento, your website needs to run fast. This is crucial for the overall user experience, and ultimately your sales, cart abandonment, rate conversion rate, bounce rate, and so on.
The performance of your Magento store depends on a lot of things that happen in the background, which is why optimization is so important. But before you start working on optimizing and improving your Magento store performance, you need to have a clear picture of what is going on at the moment. This is the best way to determine the areas that require more optimization efforts, or that can be improved.
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Choose the Right Hosting
Finding the right hosting provider for your Magento store can be crucial for customer experience. The hosting has a huge role in the website’s speed and overall performance. If you face any issues regarding hosing, hosting provider is the one who take care of these issues. So, finding the right hosing provider is important. Look for a Magento hosting company that will provide you with hosting configured properly, so that your customers can enjoy your content, without a lag, and be happy with their experience.
Make the Most of Cron Jobs
Cron jobs are essential to the performance of your Magento store because they are responsible for the timely execution of many system activities without which a functioning and fast store would be impossible. Essentially the store owner or the developer should create the Cron job, and then run a Magento Cron test to see if everything is working properly.
If they are created with correct configurations, Cron jobs will allow you to set up schedules for different types of activities such as auto-update, currency rates, catalog price rules, newsletters, reindexing, and so on. Moreover, developers can create customized Cron jobs to keep the Magento eCommerce running smoothly, and optimize a lot of areas. This can include expiring and erasing cached data files, clearing logs at determined intervals, checking for broken links, and so much more.
Cron functionality on Magento2, however, isn’t always very reliable, and this can cause issues in your store performance. In case this happens, you can debug Cron errors and run a Magento Cron test to see if the issues have been resolved. Nevertheless, you can also go for a third-party Cron extension that is more dependable.
Reduce Extensions
One simple way to improve the speed of your Magento eCommerce website is to keep as few extensions as possible. Like on WordPress or other platforms, the more extensions you have, the more HTTP requests there will be, and more CSS and JavaScript files to load.
Moreover, you should make sure that the extensions that you have and use are optimized and up to date. If the extensions you have are incompatible with one another, it may result in poor performance.
Combine CSS and JavaScript
Another thing that can result in slower performance is having a large number of layout files and scripts on your Magento store website. Having these issues on your webstore can significantly reduce your sales and conversion rate. To resolve this problem, you can combine all the CSS into one or two files, and do the same for JavaScript.
Image Optimization
One of the most common causes of slow page load time and performance issues is the use of non-optimized images. The simple solution to this common problem is to avoid using large, high-resolution images that take longer to respond and take up more space, and instead use scaled and optimized images on your Magento eCommerce website.
Clean Log Records
Magento keeps logs for up to 180 days, which affects the size of your database. This in turn will cause poor performance. Namely, if your Magento store is receiving heavy traffic or if it generates small errors, the log files will grow large. So, it’s a great practice to keep your logs clean.
Take Care of Cache
Properly managing cache will also contribute to better Magento store performance. There are 3 types of cache – the Magento cache, the server cache, and the external cache. The best way to sort them is to talk to your hosting provider and ask for professional help. Even though Magento features a built-in caching module, it’s best to use a third-party solution, because they have been giving better results.
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In Short
Customers value speed and ease of use above all when it comes to online shopping, and happy customers bring more sales and overall success to your business. While Magento offers great tools dedicated to helping you optimize your store, additional performance-boosting actions can take your eCommerce to the next level of excellence.
