A successful eCommerce site is with optimal performance. Maintaining this optimal performance is often more difficult than it seems. That’s especially true if it’s been quite some time since your website went online and many modules and plugins have been added.
Let’s talk about common reasons behind performance issues on Magento websites and practical steps you should take to optimize Magento performance.
Reason 1 – The website’s hosting environment is poor
The hosting environment is arguably the most common reason websites have poor performance. The shared hosting approach usually makes both the website and Magento website support slow. Shared hosting lacks dedicated resources and during traffic spikes slow load times are especially noticeable.
Low-quality hosting providers can’t offer advanced cashing solutions like Varnish or Redis, and they’re responsible for speeding up page loads. Inadequate server configurations can also be a problem, leading to inefficient database management and increased query response times.
The solution is to upgrade the hosting
Switch to a high-quality hosting provider that can provide dedicated resources for your Magento site. Cloud hosting or a dedicated server guarantees that your website has all the necessary resources to handle high traffic volumes.
Look out for these things when choosing a hosting provider:
- Choose hosting solutions that offer dedicated CPU, RAM, and storage resources specifically for your site.
- Consider hosting services like Google Cloud, Azure, or others that can dynamically adjust to traffic demands.
You can also implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs help distribute your content globally with low latency regardless of your audience’s geographic location.
Reason 2 – Your website support is bad
Consistent website support is what maintains optimal performance. A support team:
- Monitors your site
- Performs regular maintenance
- Resolves any issues that arise ASAP
A proactive approach in this aspect is important for your site to be fast and reliable so that customers have a positive user experience and you have minimal risk of downtime.
Reason 3 – Images and Media on your website are not optimized
Large and unoptimized images slow down your website specifically. High-resolution photos are good but will consume excessive bandwidth if not compressed or appropriately sized. This issue is especially prevalent if your ecommerce website relies on visual content to showcase products.
The solution (which impacts ranking in Google as well as user experience) is to optimize images and media.
Tools like TinyPNG or Image Optim compress images without losing quality. The content delivery network (CDN) is also helpful in serving images and other media files quickly.
Many choose to build a high-quality, performing e-commerce platform with Magento development services, not knowing that these services help with initial development and creating a scalable and maintainable site.
Reason 4 – The website has too many extensions and modules
Sometimes, it’s difficult to stop adding more and more extensions and modules to your website. They enhance functionality, but this functionality often comes at the cost of bloating your Magento installation. Each extension is an additional code. It increases the load on server resources and slows your site down. And it gets even worse when the coded modules are poorly optimized as they create redundant database queries and increase response times even more.
A simple extensions review is the solution
Audit your extensions and modules regularly to see if there are any unnecessary ones. You can disable those you have doubts about and remove those that you surely don’t need. Active extensions must go through an audit to make sure their code is good.
Reason 4 – The Magento version you’re currently at is outdated
An outdated version of Magento not only causes performance issues but also puts your website and its data in danger because of unpatched security vulnerabilities. Each Magento update comes with performance enhancements, bug fixes, and security patches that improve both performance and security. If you neglect to update, you miss out on these improvements and make your website vulnerable to cyber threats.
Switch to a newer version
Update your Magento installation to the latest stable version. It’ll help you resolve performance issues and keep the website secure.
Reason 5 – The presence of bad code
What if your website doesn’t have many extensions or customizations, but it’s slow anyway?
Poorly written code can be the issue. Poorly written code leads to increased page load times and slower server response times. This can be in the form of unoptimized database queries that were mentioned before or in the form of excessive use of inline JavaScript or CSS. The latter is guilty of delays in rendering in particular.
Check all your custom codes
Take a closer look at any custom code on your website and make sure it follows best practices and is optimized for performance. Code reviews and audits are two effective ways of identifying and fixing inefficient code.
Reason 6 – You accumulated a large database but didn’t bother to optimize it
A large yet not optimized database is a bad combination. Frequent database queries that are not indexed correctly inevitably lead to slow response times.
Use tools like phpMyAdmin to clean and optimize your database or find one that works. The main goal here is to remove unnecessary data and optimize database tables.
Here are key processes that are involved in database optimization:
- Indexing ensures that all frequently accessed columns are, well, indexed to speed up query execution
- Cleaning of unnecessary data, be it old logs, session data, or temporary files
- Partitioning improves manageability and query performance and is especially helpful for very large tables
Conclusion
To give your Magento website optimal performance, you must understand and address common performance issues. Implement practical optimization steps that relate to your individual situation, and your platform will be fast, reliable, and user-friendly.
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