Speed up Magento Development with These key Tips

by JONATHAN PAUL Jonathan Paul working at PHPProgrammers, a leading

Want to speed up your development process while working with Magento? Then here are the right tips for your shared by an expert Magento developer in Australia.

Magento is the most popular open-source eCommerce platform, which is preferred by most of the developers and eCommerce business owners now for creating a customer-driven e-store. It is a stable and robust platform, which offers scalability, high-functional level, and high customisability. As per the researches and reports, most of the reputed eCommerce sites are built with Magento, proving it is a universally used eCommerce platform.

Even though this platform gives its users excellent flexibility and full control over the store, its high performance is always the key reason why developers and eCommerce business owners love to use it. Some of the vital aspects of Magento development process is optimisation. speed, and performance and these three factors play a major role in the success of online stores.

Keeping this in mind, it is essential to build stores that are get loaded fast, perform high and is fully optimised to stay on top of the SERPs. In this article, you will come across the best tips to speed up the Magento development effectively. But before that let’s peep into the points that will tell how can you measure the current Magento speed.

When a page of a Magento site gets loaded in a browser, these actions take place:

The web page obtains the HTML data from the server.
The page examines that data and then loads all the external files there on the page.
It also generates the Document Object Map or the DOM and then renders the web page with all the elements

Now, take a look at the points that are used for measuring the web page speed:

Server response time: - It is the time span from when one has clicked the link or has typed in the link till the time when first data or info has arrived from the server.

Start Render Time: - This is the first time when the device screen displays anything else other than just a blank page.

DOM or Document Object Map Complete time: - It is the time or the moment when the web page gets loaded by any of the browsers.

The Start Render Time is considered as the most crucial time period because the faster anything appears on the screen or the page after a user requests, the quicker the website will get loaded. The idea start renders time of a good Magento website should not be more than 2 to 3 seconds.

Once you have measured the speed of your Magento project, you can consider the tips to speed it up now.

Run the most recent version of Magento:

Running the latest version of the platform is essential because, with every new update, there’s something new and improved for better performance and fixing bugs. Take these steps to use or upgrade the latest version:

Install the newest version of the Magento file tree
Run the installer now for updating the database
Move the custom themes and extensions to the new version then

And do not worry about any missing versions or upgrades as Magento always notifies its users whenever there’s a new launch of a version.

Leverage caching:

Magento comes with an in-built caching module. For better performance of the store and less start render time, Magento offers different caching forms.

Browser caching: - You can enable the Gzip compression and can expire the headers to the .htaccess file for leveraging this caching form. You can easily get this on the latest version of the platform that’s Magento 2 with its .htaccess sample file. But if you are using the older version then you need to do it manually.

Page caching: - Page caching is an excellent tip to speed up a Magento store’s performance. You can do this using the various page caching extensions that Magento comes with like full page cache pro, zoom full page cache, brim’s full-page cache, and lite speed’s lite mage cache.

Image optimisation:

One of the major reasons for a heavy and slow Magento website can be a huge number of heavy images. Ensure to optimise the images well before using the same in the online store. Use high quality yet optimised images to boost the speed of the site. The images must be compressed to ensure easier and faster page loading using fewer data and space.

There are many tools and extensions available for image optimisation when you are using Magento as the platform like PhotoShop, GTspeed, TinyPNG, etc.

Select a fast and reliable web hosting:

Choosing a fast and reliable web hosting is important to ensure the faster and higher performance of your Magento store. There are many web hosts available that give excellent start render times.

Choose the best CDN that is Content Delivery Network:

Content Delivery Network or the CDN is a connected system of many distributed servers, which sends the web content and pages to the store visitors. The geographical proximity of the visitors or customers is based on the CDN. Implementing a Content Delivery Network with a Magento store helps to reduce the site’s loading speed no matter what is the location of the customer or the visitor.

You can set up the CDN by just going to the back-end of the site and then choosing the ‘GENERAL’ option from the configuration tab of the store. Next, you have to go the the ‘web’ tab and then insert the ‘HTTP URL’ of the website in the base URL.

With these tips, you can easily end up with a fully optimised and fast Magento store. Keep these in mind whenever you are working for a Magento project.

Jonathan Paul is an expert Magento developer is a leading eCommerce development company in Australia, PHPProgrammers. The author has written this article to help out the developers in creating fast, high-performing, and optimised stores for different eCommerce businesses.