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Because Magento is a heavy e-commerce CMS system, it can run a bit slow from time to time, especially if you haven’t optimized your store. There are a number of simple things you can do to get your page load speeds up.
1. Enable Flat Catalog
Flattening your catalog should help with page load speeds. Why? Magento stores the attributes that apply to categories and products in separate database tables, depending on their data type. This EAV model allows them to be very protractible, but it also means that Magento has to search through multiple tables for spread out information. This causes longer SQL queries and more reads, meaning that information can get stuck in a kind of log jam, slowing your site down. When you flatten your categories and products, you tell Magento to store all of that data in one table for Magento to retrieve.
How to do it:
Reasons to be cautious:
The standard EAV database setup gives a little more flexibility when you’re messing around with your data and attributes. Thus, it can also be helpful for developers and when upgrading your store.
2. Merge CSS and JavaScript Files
Magento stores can possess a large number of CSS and JavaScript files, and that number only increases as you add extensions and customizations to your website. When you merge all those files, the browser only needs one HTTP request to access the content. This saves bandwidth and means that pages can load faster.
How to do it:
Reasons to be cautious:
Depending on the layout of your store, page load speeds will increase for the individual pages that a customer visits, but aren’t always improved for later pages visited in the same session, since new merged URLs can cause customers to redownload files that they’ve already downloaded. There are a few extensions on the market that can help with this issue.
Fooman Speedster is one of them.
3. Caching Magento
Magneto has a management system in place to help you organize cache and improve your store’s performance. Cache entries are stored in the file system. As you get more requests from visitors, the time it takes to read and write to Magento’s file system grows longer and longer, slowing your site down. Managing your cache properly will help speed things up.
How to do it:
Reasons to be cautious:
You will want to keep cache disabled if you’re editing the core or template files for your Magento store.
4. Clean House
To keep your store running quickly and efficiently, it’s important to make sure you don’t have too much ineffective bloat. Compile the extensions that you actually need. Disable Magento modules that you don’t need. By cleaning house, you’re using fewer resources to run your store, making it faster to operate.
How to do it:
Reasons to be cautious:
Just don’t inadvertently disable any modules you need.
5. Get your images in order
Images can be a prime culprit for slow load times. You want to make sure that your image files are optimized for the best possible performance, especially if they appear on every page of your website. There are a few different approaches you can take to keep your images loading quickly.
Reasons to be cautious:
None! Optimize those images.
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