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Performance optimization for your Magento server is very important for several reasons. The most important reason is customer experience. While shopping online, if a customer experiences sluggish page loads the entire shopping experience turns into an annoying event. Well, who wants to wait forever for their favorite product to appear and the special discount that it has? The second most important reason is search engine rankings. Page load times are an important factor for ranking web pages. Search engines perceive such pages to be of low quality and hence they lower the rankings for these pages.
Your store will eventually see higher abandonment rates and lower profits. In order to ensure that your customers stay on your website and purchase, here are some of the performance optimization techniques you can use:
Hosting Environment
The server you select for hosting your website should be able to handle a number of concurrent connections and not slow down even at peak traffic hours. This would be the first place to look at. Check your CPU utilization and memory usage. Fine tune these and get additional hardware if required.
Server Caching
Use GZIP compression if necessary. Make sure that you store temporary data for your website in multiple locations. This will ensure that your customers enjoy higher availability and accessibility for their interactions with your website. Using a web application accelerator like Varnish is also good for Magento websites. Enabling browser cache is a great idea.
Code Optimization
Uninstalling unnecessary modules from PHP or Apache could easily boost your performance. You can also use a PHP accelerator like Zend. Check and re-check your code to identify any bottlenecks.
Database Optimization
Use query indexing and such other optimization scripts to improve the performance of your databases.
Version Maintenance
It is a good idea to always upgrade to the latest version. You will get a bug free version and all the identified problems of the previous version will be fixed. With every update Magento ensures that the performance is improved.
File Size Standardization
Content and images should be optimized. Use of online image compressors is recommended. The smaller the size of your images the better it is for improving performance.
Configuration
This platform comes with a host of extensions. You can uninstall any extension that you know you are not going to use. You can also disable any modules that are not in use. Enable the cache system by going to the Cache management menu under system.
Auto Scaling
Scale your resources as per the flow of traffic. If you are expecting a spike in website traffic over the weekend or holiday season, make sure that you arrange for that.
JavaScript and Cascaded Style Sheets files
Ensure that you merge the java script and cascaded style sheet files. This reduces the time to load the site drastically.
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