Why is Magento So Slow?
Magento is a very robust and flexible eCommerce platform, but it requires proper configuration. If you have a hosting configuration that should be loading your Magento pages quickly, there might be a problem in the configuration.
As Magento web development experts, we help fix many Magento eCommerce sites that are not taking full advantage of the caching and indexing settings within Magento. This helpful Magento user guide below will help fix these problems.
There are a few configurations that can be easily missed, but make a large impact on performance.
Enable Flat Catalogs
Magento Community Editions 1.4 and newer, as well as Magento Enterprise Edition 1.9, offer "Flat Catalogs" that summarize the highly normalized data in flat summary tables. Using these flat summary tables makes a noticeable difference in the database query execution time.
Check your Flat Catalog configuration now to ensure that your Magento store is taking advantage of this key performance enhancement.
1. Log into your Magento administration panel
2. Navigate to System > Configuration > Catalog
3. Expand the "Frontend" accordion tab
4. Set "Use Flat Catalog Category" to "Yes"
5. Set "Use Flat Catalog Product" to "Yes"
Now that we have enabled the Flat Catalog options, we must refresh the indexes and populate the summary tables with the newest data.
Refresh Indexes
Here are the steps to take to refresh the indexes.
1. Log into your Magento administration panel
2. Navigate to System > Index Management
3. Click "Select All"
4. Set Actions to "Reindex Data"
5. Click "Submit"
The resulting screen should show all index statuses as "READY" with a green background.
Enable JavaScript and CSS Merging
Magento offers built-in JavaScript and CSS merging. Merging JavaScript and CSS reduces page load time by combining multiple files into a single include file with the whitespace characters stripped out. This improves page load time on your customers' web browsers.
To enable JavaScript and CSS Merging, follow these steps:
1. Log into your Magento administration panel
2. Navigate to System > Configuration
3. Click "Developer" in the left navigation
4. Expand "CSS Settings" accordion
5. In the "CSS Settings" accordion, set "Merge CSS Files" to "Yes"
6. Expand "JavaScript Settings" accordion
7. In the "JavaScript Settings" accordion, set "Merge JavaScript Files" to "Yes"
Use the Database To Store Sesssions
For Magento hosting configurations that have a dedicated database server, or for hosting environments with the proper hardware resources, use the database or memcached to store user sessions. Contact your hosting provider to verify that this is an option for your Magento online store.
1. Edit app/etc/local.xml
2. Inside the "session_save" element, change "files" to "db" or "memcache"
After implementing each of these strategies, your Magento website should begin to load faster. Need more assistance?
Our experienced team of certified Magento developers is standing by to help. Contact us today and we'll get your website up to speed in no time.
