Magento is a powerhouse for performance and can handle integrations with a lot of applications. When running a large Magento website, it is important to keep an eye on these factors to increase loading speed.
#1 Hosting
Magento requires more CPU than other website platforms, so it’s important to have a server that can handle high CPU usage. When working with Magento Open Source, you are on your own to find a web server. Look for a company that offers managed hosting (Like Blink Web Designs) specific for Magento 2 Open Source. If you are choosing to go with Adobe’s new Magento Commerce Cloud, then they take care of all the server side hosting for you. They’ll optimize and handle all the growth for you.
Magento Open Source Hosting
Magento Open Source is free to use, but there are plugin costs, server costs, and developer costs. Since we’re only talking about hosting right now, let’s go over an option that works well for self-hosting a Magento Open Source platform.
AWS servers are perfect for Magento Open Source (hint: Adobe uses them for their cloud offering too). You can get started with an instance strong enough to run Magento for just $35/month with the T2-Medium EC2 Instance. We’ve found that this provides adequate CPU for those getting started in Magento keeping your instance running fast. EC2 instances can also be equipped with their own IP address to make it easy to be found on search engines.
Keeping a lean hosting environment can make a huge impact on your Magento’s frontend and backend performance.
#2 Images
To have a professional-looking e-commerce store, professional product pictures are a must-have. When a professional photographer provides their photos, they are way too large for a website. You need to compress product images under 100kb and at a size of 600x600px in order to keep your page loading times in a good spot. On category and home pages, you’ll need to practice the same image compression for the different sized images. Try to keep all large images under 100kb each and the more you can compress, the faster the page will load. There are tools and software available to do bulk image processing, so you don’t have to do it one by one.
#3 Caching
Out-of-the-box caching from Magento 2 is good, but Redis Caching through AWS is better. It can get to be more expensive, but having a 3 node, failover Redis Caching instance will help with cache performance tremendously. I won’t go into too much detail here, but you can take a look over at their site compared to memcache: https://aws.amazon.com/redis/
On top of having a boosted caching system for optimal performance, it is also good to make sure that your server is configured proper for Expired Headers. This is a PHP module that needs to be enabled and configured, especially if you are self-hosting.
#4 Plugins
Im 2021, your iPhone can handle as many apps as you can install without slowing down. If anyone remembers 5 years ago, if you installed more than 20 apps, your phone rendering time would suffer noticeably. Apple was able to tighten it’s performance and 3rd party developed apps to keep the iPhone performing well even with a lot of apps, but Magento does not perform in the same way. Since there are a lot of moving parts already, plugins can cause a lot of problems with compatibility and loading times.
Keep the number of plugins on your Magento site to a minimum and make sure they are compatible with each other. Whenever updating a plugin or a Magento instance, it’s important to test and retest compatibility because this is the number one reason we see sites go down.
Conclusion
Magento 2 is a very powerful e-commerce platform for small businesses to grow into medium and large businesses. When creating and operating your website, pay attention to those 3 key points to keep your powerful e-commerce platform from lagging. Get in touch with us for managed Magento Hosting and managed Magento services.