Magento 2 (M2) marks a new era of e-commerce innovation and accounts for over a decade of ecommerce software development that was started with the original Magento release in 2008. Magento 2 can perform a lot of functions without the need to install a third-party extension.
Magento 1 was always an uphill battle to try, streamline loading times and overall operating performance due to its heavy demands. In juxtapose, Magento 2.0 performs extremely well with faster page load times and quicker performance on the backend thanks to the inbuilt one page caching and optimizations to the base code.
Magento 2, indeed, has more features, complex functionalities, and lines of code in comparison to the original Magento. These levels of advancements come at a cost; Magento 2 can be slower at times. Poor performance is the one issue store managers have been repeatedly complaining about.
In this article, I will share the expertise of our team on making Magento 2 faster, and provide five actionable methods to improve performance.
Time to first byte is how long Magento takes to generate HTML. This is your main performance metric. Good TTFB time is around half a second. In fact, half a second is the TTFB of a fresh copy of Magento 2. Things that could give effective TTFB are customizations, custom themes, and third-party extensions.
If you struggle with a slow Magento 2 store, a TTFB audit is the first step you should take to speed things up. To help yourself with TTFB audit, I would suggest you use XHProf. XHProf is a free PHP extension that profiles and outputs a trace like this.
To find an abusive function, you just sort by “Excl. Wall Time” and analyze the first couple of entries to see which one is taking long and why.
One of the reasons your Magento is slow is because of third-party extensions. Experts wrote Magento 2 Core. Magento custom plugins, on the other hand, are written by average programmers with average skills and in most cases no appreciation for performance benchmarks.
So an extension you bought from marketplace could slow down your Magento store. You must find all those abusive plugins and eliminate them.
To do that, go to Magento 2 Backend→Stores→Configuration→Advanced→Advanced and you will get a list of custom extensions. Go through the list and disable plugins one-by-one and benchmark speed with the help of webpagetest.org.
A gentle reminder, do not mess around plugins that come preinstalled with the copy of Magento 2. They are core plugins and are fundamental to the working of Magento 2.
If you disable an extension and notice a significant difference in speed, the extension is something your Magento 2 store must get rid of. You should contact its vendor and ask for help or find an alternative. Meanwhile, uninstall this extension and wait for an updated version or alternative.
A hosting plan is the foundation of a fast ecommerce website. Magento 2 will give poor performance when paired with poor hardware. How do you know you need to change or upgrade your housing plan? Here’s a simple test to help you decide. Install a fresh copy of Magento 2 on the very same server your Magento store is. This fresh install should be the same version as your live Magento store. Then benchmark the fresh copy against your live Magento 2 store. If this fresh copy is significantly faster than your e-store, then your hosting is all right and you don’t need to change anything.
If the fresh copy is as slow as your live Magento store, then your hosting resources are simply not enough to power your Magento 2 store. Evidently, it is the time to upgrade the hosting plan. Alternatively, you can subscribe to Magento Go.
Magento Go is a hosted, SaaS service designed for small and emerging merchants who want the benefits of selling online.
This is the easiest of the steps I mentioned above, but from my experience, many people are just completely skipping the step. Magento 2 has three running modes: default, developer, and production.
If you want maximum performance and speed, you need to switch on production mode. To find out what mode you are running in now, run this command.
php bin/magento deploy:mode:show
To switch on production mode, run this command:
php bin/magento deploy:mode:set production
You should run above commands in secure shell or SSH.
Magento 2 comes with full-page cache functionality. This means Magento 2 can cache whole pages and hide your performance issues on the paid caching layer. You should take advantage of it.
Go to the Backend→System→Cache Management and double check if full-page cache is on.
Fullpage cache supports varnish as a caching application. Varnish is a special program that could cache and serve web resources efficiently.
To set up one Varnish with Magento 2, go to Admin→Stores→Configuration→Advanced→Full-page Cache and set varnish as a caching application.
Then you need to install and configure Varnish yourself.
You might take help from a system administrator if you’re not familiar with Linux terminal and secure shell (SSH). You can simply ask your hosting support team.
Magento 2 comes with numerous performance optimization features. Your job, as a store manager, is to make most out of them.
Make sure you switch on all Magento 2 caching methods, CSS/JS minification and always run it in production mode. Avoid JS bundling as this does more harm than good.
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Magento is the leading e-Commerce platform used for building online stores and is considered as a flexible, high performing and scalable solution with out of the box functionality. The reason Magento 1 was so popular is that users can create stores with a variety of functions using pre-made extensions or by utilizing their coding chops. To fill in the gaps of Magento 1, Magento 2 was released that completely revamped the existing platform with the latest development practices for the overall growth of the e-commerce websites.
Let’s see some of the traits for considering Magento 2 for e-commerce development.
Usability is one of the important advantages of Magento 2 that can help you in developing a full-fledged e-commerce website. You need to make navigation easy that can be well handled by users. The route needs to be attractive and for that Magento 2 provides tools or extensions at the backend like automation and management orders, sales and shipping, inventory, reporting etc. which are easy to use and makes the experience useful for the backend users. These modules are created to provide comprehensive functionality for Magento UI and UX improvements and provide more advantage compared to the previous version.
Amongst the e-commerce platforms, Magento 2 is the most powerful platform in terms of SEO. Your site needs to rank high and look attractive on Search Engine Land and Magento 2 helps to do so. Magento features a range of default options to create a SEO-friendly website. Magento 2 helps to set Meta description, Meta keywords and title of a product dynamically and also enables to define product Meta tags with product attributes and predefined templates. The product Fields auto-generation feature helps to set templates for products metadata and it’s a real breakthrough as it was a problem for big stores with thousands of products.
For Global expansion, it is important for store owners to provide options for displaying the content in different languages based. Magento 2.0 supports around 80 different languages as well as has multi-currency support. It is easy to bifurcate customers, orders, templates, catalogs and domains according to the language and provides different front-ends from the same admin panel. If the language that you wish to develop is not available, you can achieve native language translations using a couple of extensions that are readily available.
The responsive design is indispensable for every modern web-store as people usually browse the web with their mobile devices. Responsive web design is all about using HTML and CSS to automatically resize a website to make it look good on tablets and smart phones. Magento 2 offers the opportunity to have a responsive design for the seamless user experience across the screens. It also provides cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility which makes it an ideal platform.
Today, customers look for the information, recommendation and offers that are as per their interests. To cater to this need Magento 2 offers personalization tools that businesses can take advantage of. Magento 2 provides the tools for the tracking shopper’s behavior, their preferences and browsing history. Based on this data, it is easy for the marketers to offer them highly personalized experiences during online shopping. By using Magento 2 for E-commerce Development, store owners can identify and create target groups using customer’s purchasing behavior which helps to increase conversion rate and enhance shopping experience for the loyal customer base.
Today, online shopper makes use of the search feature extensively and it has become an integral part of e-commerce websites. Magento 2 provides filtered search and faceted search which shows all the products that match the criteria set by the customers. By choosing Magento 2 for e-commerce development you can,
Magento 2 aims to reduce shopping cart abandonment rate and increase conversion rate. Magento 2 allows merchants to customize the checkout steps. It provides extensions that are extremely modular and enables the customers to place orders rapidly and without any hassles.
With Magento 2 for e-ecommerce development, developers get to access templates, extensions, modules, widgets, documentations, training and consulting services etc. offered by Magento 2 community and build user-centric webstores. Magento 2.0 comes with all the benefits that an open-source platform should possess.
Magento 2 has an updated admin interface which is more user-friendly, intuitive and easy to navigate. It is designed to reduce the time consumed in managing orders, categories, products and pages. The new admin interface enables to browse important business information of the companies and product creation is easier with faster import capabilities.
Speed is one of the primary requirements that developers and users look for. Magento 2 provides 20% more speed compared to Magento 1.x versions. Using Magento 2 for e-commerce development will result into:
Magento 2 is more secured than previous versions because of the changes in the structure of directories in the source. The previous version had nine folders in the root, but Magento 2 came up with the only 5 folders, and it has removed skin folder from the root directory. The JS, SKIN, ERROR, etc. folders shifted to a new directory called “Pub.” This change in the structure has made Magento 2 more secured.
As eCommerce is getting more and more popular, it’s important for online stores to get equipped with modern features and functionalities to meet customer expectations. Magento 2 aces it with features including speed, flexibility, security, and user experience.
Want to build a new online store with Magento 2? or Looking to upgrade the existing one? Get in touch with us today. Our expert team of Magento developers will dive deep to explore the hidden treasure of Magento 2 for you.