Intensifying the speed of websites is the greatest challenge known to eCommerce owners owing to its significance in driving conversions and search engine rankings. Most sites encounter that their average user attention span is getting shorter that depicts people are spending less time in strolling through the entire website. This is most prominently because the website loads with more speed and a nearly half of online buyers expect it to load in less than just 3 seconds. Thus, ensuring high speed is not only a prerequisite for better search engine results but also for great user experience. Adhering to this, it is worth nurturing more efforts for eCommerce retailers, owning Magento sites to optimise the speed. Following points explain some of the easy yet effective means of escalating the speed of websites built with Magento.
#1 Sticking to a faster web hosting
The first way to assure website's speed is choosing a fast, reliable and good host service provider that can provide high-speed connection, appropriate security standards and full-fledged support. All these three aspects assure lightning fast loading speed of websites besides eliminating any inconvenience of users.
#2 Optimising images
While images are the most critical element of every eCommerce sites and make up over half of the website's total page weight, optimising their sizes and compressing them can effectively lift up the speed of the pages. There are variety of extensions for the purpose. However, Magento's official marketplace offers easy-to-use plugins like Compress JPEG & PNG images plugin which reduce down image size without affecting its quality.
#3 Enabling compilation
While Magento offers exceptional compilation system for organising all the installation files of a concerned site, one can also beef up the page's load time by nearly 50%. One just needs to enable the tool for compilation from the admin dashboard of Magento by pressing on the "Run Compilation Process".
#4 Empowering full-page caching
Caching is perhaps one of the effective ways for reducing down the load time to an extraordinary level. Enabling the caching escalate the speed of loading as it saves the cache of user's requests. Whenever they log into the site for successive sessions, the site quickly refers to the cache rather making a new query again to the server. Magento itself has the module of internal caching and so enabling it from the 'System' is one of the first things to do for augmenting the loading speed.
#5 Utilising Flat Catalog
Maintaining the huge database of hundreds of thousands of products under varied categories is a major bottleneck of Commerce sites that impede the speed or performance. Enabling "Flat Catalog" can make spectacular improvement in site's speed because it merges and organises the vast spectrum of product categories under a table. This cuts down the time for database querying and hastens the loading speed for products/categories pages.
Website's loading speed is predominantly a vital facet determining the rate of lead conversions and directly impacts the users' span of visit on a site. Further, a site with seamless and swift loading speed is assumed to get more boost in the search engine visibility. Thus, harbouring these methods can take a website's performance to a whole new level in terms of speed.
Rob Stephen is one of the dedicated and best Magento developers in Australia working at GetAProgrammer, a prominent software and web development company, who likes sharing his inherent knowledge and expertise on eCommerce development through his article posts.