How to speed up Magento 2 website?

It can be said that a slowly loading website will lose almost everything. First of all, its users may leave immediately due to waiting such a long time. Secondly, the website doesn’t get a high SEO ranking on Google. Last but not least, it may cause a significant loss in sales.

Unfortunately, this is the most common problem facing Magento, one of the leading e-commerce platforms today. It’s true that this robust, highly scalable platform is helping a lot of web owners build powerful websites. However, the slow load speed of these websites has caused a constant worry, even for owners of Magento 2 stores.

So what can be done to solve this problem? Let’s look at these following ways on how to speed up Magento 2 website.

Choose right server

Choosing a proper server is crucial for every online store's speed. And Magento 2 stores are no exception.

As Magento 2 websites are powerful and often require a large amount of resources, shared hosting is not a perfect option. Instead, a dedicated server or a VPS is highly recommended.

Update to Magento 2 latest version

Always check for updates and ensure that your Magento site is running the latest version. This can improve your store’s performance with bug fixes and newest features. You can find more details here on how to upgrade Magento 2 store.

Enable varnish cache

Varnish Cache is an open source web application accelerator. It helps improving page load speed by storing a copy of a page in memory the first time a user browses that page. So when the user visits the page again, Varnish can deliver the cached version immediately.

To enable Varnish Cache, go to Stores > Advanced > System > Full Page Cache. Then in the ‘Caching Application’ field, click to choose ‘Varnish Cache’.

For more information, see Configure Magento to use Varnish.

Enable flat catalog

The read speed of a database is one of the main causes for slow page loading in Magento 2. However, by enabling flat catalog for categories and products, you can solve this problem.

1. Navigate to Stores >  Configuration > Catalog

2. Under Storefront tab, change Use Flat Catalog Category and Use Flat Catalog Product to Yes.

Optimize Javascript and CSS

Another way to speed up Magento 2 stores is merging and minifying JavaScript and CSS.

1. Go to Stores > Advanced > Developer

2. In the JavaScript Settings section, change the fields Merge JavaScript Files, Enable JavaScript Bundling and Minify JavaScript Files to Yes.

3. In the CSS Settings section, change the fields Merge CSS Files and Minify CSS Files to Yes.

Use Magento 2 Lazy Load extension

As you know, a default web page will load all images and videos at the same time. The consequence is that the page load speed will slow down. Understanding this problem, we developed Magento 2 Lazy Load Extension which allows loading images and videos only when customers scroll down the page.

This extension can speed up Magento 2 store UP TO 50%. Hence, the chance that customers stay longer to browse your page will increase. It is also a useful tool to improve your SEO ranking and save server bandwidth. Especially, the extension works effectively with all pages such CMS pages, home page, category pages, product pages, etc.

Business values

• Improve user experience greatly by reducing the page load time.
• SEO your website to higher Google ranking with faster loading speed.
• Save money by reducing server's bandwidth usage.
  

Feature Highlights

• Delay images and videos loading until users scroll down
• Optimize SEO for Magento 2 websites
• Reduce server bandwidth
• Apply to all pages
• Support both image and video lazy loading
• Create smooth loading transition
• Configure the threshold

Why don’t explore our Lazy Load Extension in more details? Certainly your website will benefit a lot from this free extension.

Conclusion

We hope that these above tips can help you speed up Magento 2 website. This way, you can create better experience for your customers, boost SEO rankings as well as improve conversion rates and sales.