It is essential for any business to have a fast site for keeping their bottom-line profits high. While ensuring the optimum user experience to your visitors through a quirky design, you also need to make sure that they stick to your website. It has been found that 47 percent of the visitors expect the website to open in two seconds and 40 percent of your visitors will abandon the website if it takes more than 3 seconds. Considering a live example, the BBC reported a loss of 10% visitors for every additional second consumed by their website. Therefore, it has often been regarded as a dilemma to retain your visitors while provisioning them with an engaging experience at the same time.

Moreover, with so many websites present on the internet, the ranking of your website makes a great difference to your business’ success. This ranking is done by Google based on an algorithm that takes some key factors into consideration and among those factors is the speed of your website.

All of this adds to the fact that the speed of your website plays a crucial role in defining the extent of your business’ success. Following this thought, people often ask – Does this mean that we have to give up on the attractive design and animations that we envisioned for our website? Of course, not. There is a solution to every problem.

Gone are the days when you had to choose between the speed and the sensational looks. The constant upgrades and new innovations in the existing technology have resulted in extraordinary experiences in interacting with modern websites.

The Magento 2 community is in for a treat because when it comes to Magento 2 websites, you don’t need any fancy tools to optimize the performance. Just adhere to the 8 tips mentioned below and your Magento 2 website is all set to break new records!

Tips to Optimize Magento 2

Note: Do check the speed of your website before and after applying these tips.

• 1. Third-party Extensions

  Third-party extensions have become a necessity, but they come at a cost. A third-party extension can really slow down your Magento website. Magento 2 comes from a strong programming background which is why there is seldom a chance that you need to optimize the code. Therefore, if your website is slow, you should check the integrated extensions and their effect on your website. Switch the modules on/off and clear the cache while simultaneously checking the speed of your website. If you are able to significantly speed up your website by switching off a particular extension, then voila!You found your culprit.

• 2. Hosting Service

  As part of the hosting plan, the RAM, CPU, SSD, and other configurations play the most crucial role in your website’s performance. You can’t expect a car to go fast if the tires aren’t inflated properly. In a similar way, Magento 2 has specific hosting needs for performing optimally. You can visit this website to get detailed information on these requirements.

• 3. Update

  Just updating you Magento 2 may be the only fix that you need. With every update, the Magento 2 introduces considerable improvements and bug fixes. Just login to your admin panel and check the current version of your Magento 2. The available updates can be seen in the notifications by clicking the bell icon.

  Alternatively, switching to PHP 7 can also lead to better performance. Magento 2 supports PHP version 5 as well as version 7. Updating the PHP version should also be considered to improve your website performance.

• 4. Caching

  Simply turning on the caching is one of the quick hacks in improving your website’s performance. Additionally, Magento 2 supports full page cache. This can be achieved by enabling the Varnish configuration in your admin panel. This will result in the transfer of traffic without sacrificing the loading speed. Alternatively, you can also choose the built-in cache as it provides the same functionality of full-page caching without the need for installing a third-party extension.

• 5. Minification

  As an added feature in Magento 2, you can enable the JS/CSS minification which is not present in Magento 1.Go to the developer menu present under advance configuration on your admin panel and turn on the minification. This will result in smaller files needed to be transferred over the network which eventually results in faster loading.

• 6. Production Mode

  There are three modes available in Magento 2 – default, developer, and production. The current mode of your website can be found using the SSH access details from your hosting service. The default and developer modes are recommended for debugging purposes so make sure that you always run your Magento 2 in production mode. Production mode is the fastest and it is recommended for live websites.

• 7. Flat Catalog

  Database read speed in Magento 2 is one of the most prominent causes of slow performance. Just enabling the flat catalog can fix this. For this, go to your admin panel and you will find the Catalog tab under the Configuration tab present inside your Store. Under this tab, there is a Catalog option which, on clicking, opens the Storefront. Now just change the fields of “Use Flat Catalog Category” and “Use Flat Catalog Product” in your Storefront to “yes” and you are all set to get better performance for your website.

• 8. Content Delivery Network

  Content Delivery Network provides faster delivery of Internet content such as HTML pages, JS/CSS files, and Images which results in faster loading time for your website. It is a common practice to optimize your website performance. You can also set up a CDN for your Magento 2. You will find a “Web” tab if you go to your Store > Configuration > General. Under this Web tab, you will see a Base URL section and add HTTPS URLs for CDN.

Improving the performance of your Magento 2 website is not as difficult as you might think. Adhering to these tips will exceed your expectations in terms of optimization. In addition to this, using a good theme, choosing the right extensions, and optimizing your content such as images can also make a huge difference. Magento 2 is not slow, you just have not adopted the right methods!