Magento 2.0 – tips for optimization

From various eCommerce development platforms available in the market, Magento is very popular among merchants and users. It might pique your interest to know that over 250,000 merchants around the world use Magento for their eCommerce business. 

To make a successful business online you have to be visible to the search engines and on their search results. Now one of the most important factors that affect your reach is the speed of your website. If your Magento eCommerce website is slow then people would get bored fast and would never want to visit your site again. There are many reasons why your site might slow down. If you have hired an eCommerce development company to build custom eCommerce solutions for your business, they can get you through the process in no time. But if you are doing it all on your own then it's time to pay attention. Because in this blog, we are going to discuss just how you can optimize your Magento 2 platform to improve your search engine rankings. This will also help you provide a better user experience. So let's get started. 

Top 12 tips for Magento 2 optimization 

1. Optimize Your Images 

When you are selling products online, of course, your store must have tons of images to show your products to the customers. If there are too many of them uploaded then also it affects the speed of your website. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to delete all of them. What you can do is compress all these images. The images with big sizes will take time to load and that lowers the quality of the user experience. You can use the latest formats like JPEG, JPEG 2000, and more. They load around 40% faster in comparison to traditional formats. 

2. Use Lazy Loading For Your Images 

Another great solution to optimize your Magento 2 is lazy loading. It is recommended by google that if your website consists of dozens of images then you can imply lazy loading to it. This will speed up your loading time and it's easy to implement too. When implied, lazy loading will quickly load images that are of importance or necessary and it will delay the loading of the rest of the images until the user scrolls down to the website. Using this tip will save your bandwidth space, optimize the loading speed and enhance the user experience. 

3. Conduct Server Side Checkups 

This is probably one of the most ignored points in optimizing Magento 2. If you want to increase the speed of your Magento 2 website, it is highly recommended that you use an 8 GB RAM/4 Vcpu server for it. 

4. Enable Flat Catalog In Magento 2 

Flat Catalog is a new feature in Magento 2 that allows you to add content from your website as well as from external sources. This can be done by using widgets, which are small code snippets that can be added to your website to display information. The advantage of this feature is that it allows you to create a single catalog, where you can use all the content available on your website.

Flat Catalog also allows you to include subcategories and products in the same catalog. It's beneficial for your and the customers, as it allows you to create large sections for products which makes it easy for you to fill in all the necessary details properly and it catches the customers’ eye which helps them find what they are looking for. To enable Flat Catalog in Magento 2, follow these steps:

• Go to System > Configuration > Show View Options button.

• Click on the icon labeled Show Flat Catalog option (it looks like two chevrons).

• Click on the Save Configuration button when prompted.

5. Remove Unwanted Attributes and Modules In Magento 2

Another thing you can do to optimize Magento 2 is to identify all the unused attributes and modules within your store. The easiest way to do this is by using a tool such as uBlock Origin, which flags any attribute that has been set up but never used in any code. This tool is available for Firefox and Chrome browsers, but you can install it directly from GitHub if you wish.

Once installed, open the browser window and enter your store's URL into the 'Filter' box at the top. By default, this will find all pages with 'unused_attributes_*' in their URL path and return them to you in a list. You can then use another tool such as Firebug or Grease Monkey to remove these unused attributes so they don't pollute your code base any further.

6. Optimize Your JavaScript Code and CSS

To optimize your Magento 2.0, you have to make sure that your JavaScript code and CSS are optimized. This will help make your site load faster and boost sales. Here's how:

If you open up your Magento storefront and look at the JS code, you'll notice that it's all mixed in one file. This makes it very difficult for developers who work on multiple stores with different languages or who have no experience with CSS to find something specific.

The best way to fix this is by separating the different sections of JS code into different files. This allows for more control over how those sections are used and makes it easier for developers who don't know CSS to use them correctly.

Another thing that can slow down performance on your store is CSS files. The reason why this happens is because Magento uses a lot of CSS when creating individual products, categories, and other elements within the storefront. 

7. Set up a caching system

Caching is an essential part of any website design and should be considered by every webmaster, even if it's not part of their Magento experience. Caching helps reduce server load and improve page load times by storing static content like images and stylesheets on a server closer to the user's connection (e.g., a CDN).

8. Use CSS minification as much as possible

It's important! Minification reduces the size of web pages while maintaining all of their functionality; these savings can be used to serve more pages per request or increase overall speed. There are several tools available for Magento developers to use to minify CSS files on their sites; one such tool is cssmin [http://cssminer.com/].

9. Use CDN To Boost Up Content Delivery 

The next thing on the list that can help you provide an amazing user experience by optimizing your Magento 2 site is a Content Delivery Network or CDN. This will allow you to build a cache of the files on your website on various remote servers. This will help you provide the content according to the users’ query as quickly as possible. In this case, though, it doesn't matter what hosting services you are using because while accessing your online store, every user will experience the same speed. If you want to get more benefits from this network, it is highly recommended that you install the CDN on-premise instead of installing it on the cloud. 

10. Enable GZip Compression  

We all mostly know what GZip is used for and most of us have used it often. It's a basic application that is used to compress or decompress files. It's easy enough to underestimate how useful such an app can be in migrating large chunks of data from one platform to another. 

You can use GZip to compress all your files and pages on-site to boost its speed considerably. Compressing with GZip also reduces the time to the first byte as well as the response time of the server. Let's say, if you have a page whose size is around 128 kb then GZip can compress it to 30-40 kb and then send it to the browser. 

11. Clear The Unnecessary Database Logs 

If you don't clean up the unwanted database logs then they will just keep piling over time. A large number of unwanted database logs can reduce the speed of your eCommerce website. So, remember to clean up your database log from time to time. This seemingly simple tip is one of the most effective techniques to optimize your Magento 2 website. You can clean the database logs by going to the PHPMyAdmin panel and then manually deleting the records from there. 

12. Activate Varnish Cache Tool

When you activate the varnish cache tool, it will create a layer between the web server and the user. And this tool will cache all the files that are requested by the users in the RAM regularly. Using this tool will help the website deliver the requested files to the users more quickly. The user won't even have to wait for the page to load. If you want to make the best out of this tool then it is necessary to integrate it with the CDN. And once that is done, the CDN will take care of all the caching and optimizing of your website. 

Final words 

I hope that you will find all the tips discussed in this blog very helpful for optimizing your Magento 2 site. Still, if you feel overwhelmed with the work and its details, you can always ask around in the community for help. Since this is an open-source platform, a lot of documentation and video tutorials are also available to guide you through. Thanks for reading!