Everyone wants to get to the top of SERP to receive tons of traffic. But a few realize that website speed plays a huge part in that. You can improve your meta tags, optimize structured data and write great content but still don't get the expected results. All because your Magento is slow.
Today, we'll uncover the reason why is Magento slow and talk about things you shouldn't do if you want to get to the Google PageSpeed "green" zone.
Let's get right to it.
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1. Insufficient Hosting
Magento is a resource-based platform and has certain server requirements that need to be met. That's why the first and most common reason for Magento's slow performance is a poorly configured server and limited resources. Something your hosting provider is responsible for.
Your Magento must have enough disk space, RAM, and CPU power for your store to load fast. Besides, improperly configured web servers like Apache and Ngnix, MySQL, PHP, etc can lead to loading delays and other issues along the way.
Finally, your hosting might be too far to return system requests quickly.
Never choose an unreliable hosting, located far away, with limited resources.
2. Outdated Magento Version
New Magento releases always bring new features. But that's not the only benefit. Each Magento version has improved performance, security and better code. Besides, the new version brings optimizations for database queries, caching and more effective integration with various services.
While missing a few new features is not critical, your Magento performance can suffer significantly from this. Avoid that by downloading the latest Magento version and updating it.
Never stay on an outdated version of Magento.
3. Unoptimized Extensions
With so many options available it's easy to go overboard with the Magento 2 extensions. Some will come in handy, while the other will just clutter your store with unoptimized code and cause performance issues.
The worst is even — you disable the extensions without removing them entirely. The unused code makes your website heavier and contributes to slow Magento loading times.
Never keep unused extensions or choose poorly-optimized modules.
4. Bulky Themes
When trying to create better user experiences merchants get carried away with visual appeal and branding. Forgetting that page loading speed plays a role in that too.
Not all themes are the same. Unfortunately, most of them always contain bulky elements, unoptimized images and excessive features.
The result? An attractive store that takes ages to load. You won't impress anyone with that design if people leave before a page renders. Go for instead.
Never choose Magento themes that lack speed optimization.
5. Large Database
Every process in your store goes through the database — new customers, orders, transactions, stock updates, etc. The databases grow more complex as your store scales up. The bigger the store the larger the database. The more data there is the longer it takes to retrieve specific data. You get the idea.
Poorly optimised queries make things even worse. If the queries are inefficient they will scan tons of data unnecessarily to return specific data or update it. As a result, vital store processes are slowed down, causing customers to wait for the page to load.
Never keep store logs uncleared for too long and continue using complex queries with a huge number of calls.
6. Unoptimized Images and Videos
Not surprisingly images and videos take up the most space in your store. Keeping them unoptimized only adds up the pressure on the system to load and render all of them.
Switching to new file formats like WebP can significantly boost your slow Magento. This type of image loads faster due to the reduced size. But that's not the only thing you should keep in mind.
Loading images and videos right after someone visits a page leads to longer processing times. Use lazy loading to reduce the delay and load only those images people see within their viewport.
Never load all images on the page, use outdated image formats or play videos before the play button is pressed.
7. Unoptimized CSS and JS Files
Magento website can't load if the browser doesn't download all the JS and CSS files first. The heavier the files, and the more of them you have, the longer the page renders. That's what might be causing your Magento 2 slow loading.
While JS bundling is supposed to speed up Magento through a smaller number of HTTP requests, the result is the opposite. The size of the JS files becomes too big to load fast. Avoid using that.
Besides, not all JS and CSS files are critical for page rendering. Why load all of them at once when a page renders? Load only critical ones and move the rest to the bottom of the page for later.
Finally, the JS and CSS files might just contain a lot of unnecessary data like spaces and comments that contribute to the heavier size. Minification helps with making the files load faster.
Never use JS bundling, keep all JS and CSS files at the top of the page and load all of them at once.
8. Missing CDN
You might feel like you don't need the Content Delivery Network (CDN) since you don't sell worldwide. However, the distance between your visitor and your website server could be the reason why is Magento so slow.
CDNs cache content like HTML pages, stylesheets, images and JS files closer to the user's location. So content is delivered to the visitor faster than it would if they had to visit the central website server.
Never ignore the importance of the CDN for your Magento performance.
9. Poorly-configured Caches
When a visitor comes to your website, a page is generated for them with all the elements. How fast the page returned depends on whether it was cached before. Why? If Magento has stored page content in a temporary storage location, it won't have to generate it from scratch every time a page loads. It's a resource-intensive process.
That's why proper caching is so important for Magento's slow loading. Using full page caching, browser caching, block caching and other types of caches in your Magento can significantly boost the loading speed.
Since Magento has a lot of built-in caching tools you just can't ignore that vital speed optimization feature.
Never leave your cache unoptimised.
Slow Magento: Solution
These are just nine factors that drastically influence your Magento performance. That's why you should pay close attention to them. However, they are not the only things you can optimize to get a better loading picture. Things like fonts, GZIP conversion and flat catalogues matter too.
It seems like "too much" when you start improving your Magento loading speed. But it doesn't have to be. Go to our step-by-step guide on how to speed up Magento 2 and work through every little detail that influences your webite speed.
Feel free to contact us any time if you feel overwhelmed or let us do the for you.
