Magento 2 speed up

If your site's bounce rate tends to rise and your conversion rate is going down, the first thing you should check is your Magento 2 speed. Slow page load time can cost you sales and what is more important, you can lose your regular customers.

When you notice your Magento performance seems to be too poor, make sure to check and optimize all of the following factors affecting site's speed.

How to Speed Up Magento 2?

Your Magento 2 speed is overly dependant on the hosting server you choose for your site. Make sure the selected hosting complies with all Magento 2 requirements and that is highly secure and can provide a fast response to all server's requests.

The activated cache can greatly accelerate Magento 2 speed up by relieving your server from loading pages after every refresh.

To enable cache on your Magento 2, go to 'System' => 'Cache Management' and check if all cache type statuses are set as 'Enabled'.

Production mode is considered to be the best option for fast Magento 2 performance as in this mode the code is compiled and static view files are generated in pub/static directory.

In order to change the mode from developer to production, use the following command: bin/magento deploy:mode:set production

3-d party modules are often coded not quite professionally enough and might cause a serious slowdown in your Magento 2. So make sure to check all of the additional modules you integrated with your Magento.

You can figure out whether your site is working slowly because of such reason by deleting 3-party extensions from your Magento one by one. After deleting a module, check if your site's performance is better than when the extension was activated.

TTFB (Time To First Byte) comprises the time spent on browser sending a request to server and server sending the answer back to the browser and also server's generating of HTML.

The optimal TTFB recommended by Google is not more than 0,5 s. In case it takes more time for your server to respond, you should audit your Magento profiler.

If you still have not enabled the profiler, you should definitely do it for it helps to analyze the server response time. Magento 2 has its own profiler which can be activated by putting the MAGE_PROFILER server variable to HTML or in the first lines of index.php: $_SERVER['MAGE_PROFILER'] = 'html';

After that clear the cache and load any frontend page. Find the files with the biggest load time and check them.

Your site will load much faster if you reduce the size of big files contained. In order to merge and minify CSS and JavaScript, go to 'Stores' => 'Configuration' => 'Advanced' => 'Developer' and expand 'JS settings' and 'CSS settings'. Set the corresponding options to 'Yes'.

Flat catalog function creates tables with catalog data on-the-fly. These tables contain all necessary information about categories and products which is automatically updated every minute or according to your cron job.

You can enable Flat catalog by going to 'Stores' => 'Settings' => 'Configuration' => 'Catalog' => 'Catalog' and setting 'Use Flat Catalog Category' (to activate the field, uncheck 'Use system value box') and 'Flat Catalog Product' to 'Yes'. Do not forget to press 'Save Config' button.

Do not forget to update your store to the latest version in time. Thus your Magento will be provided with bugfixes and optimized performance. Before making the update, make sure you’ve backed up your database.

Conclusions

Customers like to shop on fast-working websites, especially when it comes to proceeding through the checkout. If it takes too long to enter a product page or open an image, probably you will lose a client. That's why Magento 2 speed optimization should be your regular task. All of the above-stated Magento speed up methods are really effective and quite easy to be applied, so you should take the time to accomplish them.