Magento 2 tuning: Tips and Tricks for Better Performance

Magento is a robust & scalable framework, there are so many techniques available for Magento 2 site performance improvement. You can follow Magneto best performance practices guide, major steps you can do from the Magento backend configuration. Let’s see this blog in detail.

Below techniques help for performance optimization of your Magento 2 sites.

Cahe is the best solution Magento provides for best performance. It responds very fast to the users requests. Caching improves server response time, reduces load on server, increases traffic. In Magento you can cache certain pages for faster response, not all the pages can be cached.

Indexing helps to improve performance. Magento reindexes automatically whenever one or more items change. Magento reindexes in the background process. Reindexing data speeds up processing and reduces the customers waiting time.

The indexers can be set to either ‘Update On Save’ or ‘Update On Schedule’
‘Update On Save’: in this mode, Magento starts reindexing on save actions.
‘Update On Schedule’: in this mode , reindex runs according to a schedule as a cron job.

Elasticsearch is a highly scalable distributed search engine, it includes both search suggestions and recommendations. This feature improves indexation speed and restricts the indexer from use by 3rd party extensions.

We would recommend enabling flat catalog for quick reindexing & speedup processing. Magento stores catalog data in multiple tables, based on the EAV (Entity attribute value) model, and due to this product attributes are stored in many tables, SQL queries are sometimes long & complex.

Flat catalog creates a new table, where each row contains all the necessary data about a product or category. A flat catalog indexing can also speed up the processing of catalog. For example, A catalog with as many as 40000 sku’s can be indexed quickly using a flat catalog.

CDN (Content Delivery Network) used to store media files. CDN delivers fast to the users requests as it delivers content from the nearest server of the users.

When a Visitor in a particular location (e.g US) makes the first request for a static content on your website. Then the asset is retrieved from your actual server when it is being delivered, and the assets get cached on the CDN’s US server, the nearest CDN based on visitors location. When next time visitors request the same content on your website, the request goes to the nearest CDN edge server to check if the asset is already in cache. If the request is already cached by the same edge server then the visitor will receive a response from the server. This helps in improving the load time.

Magento releases new versions periodically by offering new features, integration, security patches, bug fixes, and more improvements. We would recommend using the latest version of Magento 2. If you’re still using the old version of Magento 2, then upgrade it to the latest version 2.4.2 for better performance

Hosting is also an important factor for performance optimization. We would recommend choosing a hosting that is fast, reliable, and delivers a smooth experience.

Use of many third-party modules means more load of unwanted js files. You can reduce the use of modules if you can. Sometimes there is a possibility many modules are unnecessary. They introduce extra processing with a negative impact on performance and speed. You can uninstall the modules which are not in use. It will help to minimize the load of resources and improve site speed.

Magento 2 provides many settings and tools that you can use to improve response time on the pages.

In Magento 2 you can run indexer either in Update on Save or Update on Schedule mode. Recommends to use Update on Schedule mode in production, as this mode stores information about data updates and performs indexation by portions in the background through a specific cron job.

To change mode of indexers go to the System > Tools > Index Management

Cache is a system location, where frequently accessed data gets stored. By using Magento 2 Cache functionality sites content can load faster.

Enable cache from the System-> Tools-> Cache Management.
We highly recommend activating all the caches in your production server.

Varnish cache is the most recommended solution for your site speed improvement. Varnish is a proxy server. It is the layer in front of the server. It is useful to deliver content fast. When a visitor requests your site, then this request will not send to Magento, it’s delivered from cache. Varnish checks if visitors request for Home page, Checkout, without firing a mysql query, or without hitting any php code it delivers content from cache.

Redis keeps data in the server memory (RAM) for the best performance. Redis is one of the most efficient caching mechanisms, particularly for Magento 2.

Redis allows the server to move the most frequently used page content from disk to RAM. This will increase the response rate when the user makes database and API calls or wants to load a webpage.

Advanced JavaScript bundling helps to reduce the number of server requests and size of server requests. The goal of JavaScript bundling is to reduce the number and size of requested assets for each page loaded in the browser. To do that, we want to build our bundles so that each page in our store will only need to download a common bundle and a page-specific bundle for each page accessed.