Magento is a titan in the e-commerce world, a platform trusted by millions for its scalability and flexibility. It is no surprise that Magento powers 0.8% of all websites globally, demonstrating its widespread adoption. Businesses using Magento often experience impressive growth, averaging three times faster than the industry standard.
However, even the most powerful engines require fine-tuning. While Magento handles complex projects with ease, it can be hampered by a slow front end, cumbersome updates, and difficulties implementing improvements. Performance optimization is crucial for Magento stores to overcome these challenges and improve their speed and efficiency.
One particular source of concern is loading speed. In today’s digital landscape, a slow website can lead to lower conversion rates. Recent Google algorithm updates highlight this point, potentially burying slow-loading Magento stores deep in search results.
While these challenges are real, there are emerging solutions, such as Hyvä, that promise to streamline your Magento store’s front end and maximize its capabilities. Let’s see how to improve your Magento performance with Hyvä.
Hyvä emerged in the Magento 2 community in 2020, promising a revolutionary front-end experience. The developers envisioned a solution to Magento’s performance issues: a lighter, faster, and more streamlined frontend experience for both developers and users.
Consider a Magento store that retains its robust capabilities while eliminating unnecessary elements. Hyvä accomplishes this by streamlining stylesheets and removing unnecessary JavaScript libraries, resulting in a significantly faster and more responsive storefront.
What is a Hyvä theme for a Magento store?
So, what exactly is a Hyvä theme? In essence, it transforms Magento stores. Hyvä is a high-performance, mobile-first theme dedicated to providing your customers with a lightning-fast experience.
It should be noted that nearly half of Magento customers (46%) make purchases using their mobile phones.
Performance optimization benefits of Hyvä themes:
Here’s how Hyvä can improve your Magento store:
Lightning-fast speed: Hyvä removes the unnecessary weight that is often associated with Magento’s front end. It provides a lean codebase that reduces the amount of code sent to the browser, resulting in much faster page load times. This results in a seamless and responsive experience for your customers, keeping them engaged and satisfied.
Enhanced User Experience: Hyvä uses modern technologies to create a captivating and interactive user interface. Higher conversion rates result from the enjoyable browsing experience provided by the simple, minimalist design and seamless transitions.
SEO Boost: Hyvä is an ideal choice for SEO due to its ultra-fast performance and lightweight design. A faster website may help your store rank higher in search engine results, drawing in more organic traffic and potential buyers.
Effortless Customization: Hyvä allows you to easily customize your website. With Tailwind CSS and modular architecture, you can easily match the appearance and feel of your brand. Hyvä still performs exceptionally well even when you change certain design elements.
Conclusion on Full Page Cache benefits with Hyvä themes
If you own a Magento store and want a faster, more user-friendly storefront, Hyvä is definitely worth considering. Its modern approach and focus on performance can revitalize your online store.
That’s it, folks! Check out our blog for more information.
Reading Time: 6minutes
WordPress is an open-source content management platform (CMS) that allows users to create and manage websites easily and efficiently. It is one of the most popular CMS systems in the world and is used for a wide range of websites, including blogs, news sites, business sites, e-commerce, and much more.
WordPress offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface that allows users to add, edit, and publish content to their site quickly and easily, without the need for advanced programming or design knowledge.
The flexibility of WordPress allows you to customize the look and functionality of the site using themes and plugins. Themes allow you to change the look of your site with ease, while plugins add extra features like image galleries, contact forms, SEO optimization and much more.
WordPress is widely used because it offers numerous benefits. It is highly customizable, scalable and supports a wide range of features. Additionally, WordPress is search engine optimized, meaning that sites built with WordPress tend to have good visibility in search results.
Furthermore, WordPress is an ever-evolving platform with a large community of developers and users who contribute to the development and improvement of the system. This ensures that WordPress remains up-to-date, secure, and at the forefront of the latest trends in web design and development.
In summary, WordPress is a powerful CMS platform that allows users to create and manage websites easily and effectively. It is suitable for any type of website and offers numerous advantages in terms of flexibility, customization and search engine optimization.
If you’re looking toTiming the speed of your WordPress site, you made the right choice. A fast site not only improves the user experience but can also have a positive impact on search engines and conversions. In this article, we’ll explore some strategies and best practices for making your own WordPress super fast.
15 Tips on how to improve your speed
1. Choose quality hosting
To ensure a fast and reliable experience for your site visitors, it is essential to choose quality hosting. With reliable hosting and high performance, it will have fast servers, adequate support, and scalable infrastructure. Make sure you do thorough research and choose a provider that meets your needs.
In fact, hosting can negatively or positively influence SEO and have a really important impact on the speed of your site.
Did you know that if a website is too slow, more than 40% of visitors will leave and never return? This is not only a matter of having the sought-after content immediately available but also of the image we are giving to the user. An image of lack of seriousness and unreliability.
This is why all of Ghost‘s shared and VPS hosting services are high–performance and speed-oriented. This way, even during peak visits, you will have peace of mind that your site will respond well and quickly.
2. Use a lightweight and optimized theme
The choice of the right theme can make a difference in the speed of your WordPress site. Choose a light and well-optimized theme over one with a lot of unnecessary features. A lightweight theme will reduce page loading time and improve overall site performance.
So be careful with the free ones because they are not always optimal from a performance and SEO point of view. Sometimes it is better to pay a small amount (we are around €40) but be sure to have a theme that does not weigh down the site and does not make it slower.
The Images can significantly slow down your WordPress site. Make sure you optimize your images before uploading them to the site.
This factor is very important because images heavier than 100 KB can really impact the weight of the page and make it slow and inefficient.
Use image compression tools to reduce file size without compromising visual quality. Also, consider using lighter image formats like JPEG instead of PNG.
4. Use a cache
A cache is a tool that temporarily stores the pages of your site to make them quickly available to subsequent visitors.
As you can see, this tool is extremely useful if our page contains a large amount of content, such as high-quality images or code files. In fact, these contents may take some time to load. With the cache, we solve this problem since this tool makes a temporary copy of the contents. This means that they do not have to be requested again from the server where the site is hosted, thus saving time.
Using a caching plugin, such as WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache, can significantly improve the loading speed of your WordPress website. Configure the plugin correctly to maximize results.
5. Minify CSS and JavaScript files
CSS and JavaScript files can become cumbersome and slow down your website. Use tools minification to reduce the size of these files by removing white spaces, comments and unnecessary characters. Also, consider using asynchronous or deferred loading methods to further improve performance.
Maintaining WordPress and updating plugins is critical to ensuring the security and performance of your website. Regular updates include bug fixes, performance improvements, and security patches. Make sure you update regularly to make the most of the latest versions available.
7. Monitor your site’s performance
In the end, monitor your site’s performance regularly using tools likeGoogle PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. These tools will give you an overview of areas that can be improved. Use this information to make any necessary optimizations and continue to keep your WordPress super fast.
8. Optimize your HTML code
It is important to optimize images, CSS, and JavaScript files. Also, pay attention to your WordPress site’s HTML code. Minimize the use of unnecessary tags, avoid excessive nesting of elements, and make sure your code is valid and well-structured. Clean, lightweight HTML will help improve the overall performance of your site.
9. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a system of servers distributed around the world that can store and deliver your site’s content more efficiently. By using a CDN service like Cloudflare or MaxCDN, you can improve page loading speed, reduce latency, and provide a better experience to users from different parts of the world.
10. Limit the use of unnecessary plugins
Even if plugins can add interesting features to your WordPress site, excessive use of plugins can slow down performance. Periodically check the plugins installed on your site and disable or remove those that are no longer necessary. Keep only plugins essential for the functioning of your site and look for lightweight alternatives or integrated solutions to avoid unnecessary overloads.
11. Use an advanced caching strategy
In addition to the basic cache provided by plugins, you can implement an advanced caching strategy to further improve the performance of your WordPress site. For example, you can use database caching to store the results of your most frequently asked queries or implement a server-level cache using tools like Redis or Memcached. These solutions can significantly reduce page load times and improve the overall responsiveness of your site.
12. Optimize the database query
The database query can significantly affect the performance of your WordPress site. Make sure you optimize your queries by using appropriate indexes, avoiding complex or redundant queries, and limiting the number of queries executed on each page. You can use plugins like Query Monitor and WPDB Profiling to analyze your site’s queries and identify any optimization issues.
13. Minimize the use of external scripts
The external scripts come in tracker analytics or widget social; they can add functionality to your site, but they can also slow down performance. Limit the use of external scripts to only essential ones and try to load them asynchronously or deferred to avoid slowdowns in page display.
Page loading speed is a crucial factor in user experience. Make sure your pages load quickly by optimizing your code, reducing the number of HTTP requests, using GZIP compression, and enabling browser compression. You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to identify page loading speed issues and make necessary optimizations.
15. Enable GZIP compression
GZIP compression is a technique that reduces the size of files sent from the server to the user’s browser. Enabling GZIP compression can significantly reduce file transfer time and improve page loading speed. You can enable GZIP compression via your .htaccess file or by using specific plugins.
Conclusion
Now that you have read everything and know what things to pay attention to to speed up your WordPress, you will be able to improve your site.
By following these best practices, you can make your WordPress site super fast and ensure an optimal experience for your visitors.
That’s it, folks! Check out our blog for more information.
Reading Time: 4minutes
The speed of the website is a critical factor for the user experience and for its positioning on search engines. In particular, for one site, WordPress, speed is even more important since it is a resource-intensive platform to work properly on.
The user experience
Website speed has a significant impact on the user experience. A slow site can increase the abandonment rate and reduce user satisfaction. Conversely, a fast site can improve user experience, increase satisfaction, and reduce churn.
Positioning on search engines
Website speed is also an important factor for positioning on search engines. Google has stated that website speed is one of the factors it uses to determine placement in search results. Also, fast websites are more likely to be shared on social media, increasing traffic and search engine rankings.
How do I optimize the speed of a website in WordPress?
Website speed is critical to user experience and search engine rankings. A fast site increases user satisfaction and reduces the abandonment rate. In this article, we will explore some techniques to optimize the speed of your WordPress website.
Choose quality hosting
The choice of hosting is crucial to ensuring the speed of your site. Choose a reliable and fast provider. Also, choose a plan for hosting that is in line with your needs. Quality hosting has powerful and reliable servers, which guarantee a fast and stable connection. Furthermore, quality hosting also offers reliable and fast technical support, which can help you in case of any problems.
Use a lightweight theme
A feature-heavy, heavy theme slows down your site. Choose a light theme and clean it to ensure maximum speed. A lightweight theme reduces page load time because it contains only what is necessary for the site to function. Additionally, a lightweight theme is also easier to customize and maintain.
Use caching plugins
Caching plugins can greatly optimize the speed of a WordPress website. These plugins create a cached version of your site that is served to users, reducing page load time. Caching plugins can be very effective for websites with static content, such as blogs or e-commerce sites. Using a caching plugin, you can reduce the page loading time of your site, improving the user experience and positioning on search engines.
Images are often the root cause of slow websites. Make sure you use optimized images and reduce their size as much as possible. Images can be optimized in various ways, such as compression or resolution reduction. Also, you can use online tools to reduce the size of images without losing quality.
Use the CDN
The CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network of servers that distribute the content of your site around the world. Using the CDN, your users can access your site from servers closer to them, improving page loading speed. The CDN can be especially useful for websites with users in different parts of the world. Using the CDN, you can reduce the page load time of your site, improving the user experience and positioning on search engines.
Reduce the number of HTTP requests
The number of HTTP requests required to load a page affects site speed. Reduce the number of requests by reducing the number of files needed to load the page. You can reduce the number of HTTP requests by deleting unnecessary files or combining similar files. Additionally, you can use techniques like sprite CSS to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
Use compression
File compression can greatly reduce file size and improve upload speed. Use compression to reduce the size of HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. File compression can be done using techniques such as GZIP or Brotli. File compression can reduce the loading time of your site’s pages, improving user experience and search engine rankings.
It uses HTTP/2 technology
HTTP/2 technology is a new version of the HTTP protocol that was designed to improve the loading speed of web pages. Using the HTTP/2 technology, you can reduce the loading time of your site’s pages, improving the user experience and ranking on search engines.
Optimizing the speed of your WordPress site takes time and effort, but the benefits are numerous. A fast site improves user experience and search engine rankings. Use these techniques to ensure maximum speed for your site. Remember that your site’s speed is an important factor in the success of your online business, so don’t overlook it.
That’s it, folks! Check out our blog for more information.
Reading Time: 5minutes
A website, especially in e-commerce, must respond quickly to the user. Therefore, this guide will show you how to optimize Shopware’s performance.
Some tricks can be useful to improve the performance of your Shopware website. But let’s start by seeing together what they are.
Choose a suitable Shopware hosting provider
A hosting provider should be reliable, efficient and secure. Furthermore, it should be able to offer its customers the possibility to update their hosting plan during the construction phase, if they need a more performant resource. In essence, the customer must be able to modify their offer according to the development and growth of their shop.
Not to mention that the support part must be fully effective. Continuous support can give you feedback in the unfortunate event that problems arise. Unfortunately, it can happen online. The important thing is that your provider can give you immediate and effective support.
By choosing the right hosting optimized for your platform, you can guarantee an efficient and fast service, so that your customers are fully satisfied.
How to Measure Performance
The first step is to measure performance so you can identify critical issues and know where to intervene.
When measuring the store’s performance, loading times can only be an indicator of the expected performance level. The features present in your store, ranging from item counting to internal structure or momentary capacity utilization, will always have a significant influence on loading times.
Measuring Performance with Firebug
To generate comparable measurements, we recommend installing the Shopware demo data plugin before running tests in your store. Firebug is a browser extension that can be installed directly through your browser. If installed, it will display the loading times for each component of the page in the browser’s network tab.
Particularly relevant are the loading times of the entire web page, most likely the first item in the list. To collect relevant measurements, it is necessary to load the target page multiple times, listing the pages and noting all the loading times.
Measuring Performance with the Apache Benchmark
To call the benchmark using a Linux shell, use the following command:
Here you should choose the average of all connection times (= total time).
Optimizing MySQL Configuration
The default configuration of many distributions is not ideal for production environments. But don’t worry, there’s a script for that! “Mysqltuner” provides suggestions for non-optimal configuration and parameter settings.
Tips for Improving Performance
Standard Sorting for Category Lists
If you have defined your sorting criteria, you should make sure that there is an index in your database for each of the columns in the table.
Changing Your Update Strategy
There are several processes active when you access one of the pages of your store. For example, SEO links are generated, the search engine cache is generated, and the data necessary to display best-selling items or other items of interest, based on similar customer behavior.
So you need to consider whether or not all of these features can be useful to your store.
For example, you can consider changing the update strategy from “live” (request per page) to “cronjob” (cumulative, timed). To do this, go to Configuration –> Cache/Performance –> Cache/Performance –> Settings (tab).
Look for the entries SEO (1), Search (2), Top sellers (3) and Referral Marketing (4) and you can make your changes directly. To use the cronjob features, you will need to first install two custom plugins, “Cron” and “CronRefresh”. With these plug-ins, you can control the timing of server requests and you should schedule them, most likely at night.
Enabling HTTP Cache
With Shopware, you can use caching instead of retrieving all data from the database in real-time for each user. Since each database access uses scarce web resources, consider also enabling http-cache. This will create a cache file, which incorporates the most important information from the article list and its detail page, thus preventing unnecessary database queries. This will also make browsing your store much faster and therefore more enjoyable.
With the cronjob we created above, we made sure that the cache file does not grow too large, as it is regularly deleted (default value: every 24 hours). This has proven to be quite practical as the HTTP cache could grow by 1-2 GB per day if used frequently.
Activate the HTTP cache via Configuration –> Cache/Performance –> Cache/Performance –> Settings (tab) > HTTP Cache and check the plug-in and all changes made for compatibility with your store.
We recommend running a test before activating the changes made.
Plugin Inspection
There are many cases where the use of plugins has had a serious impact on the performance of a store. To check whether or not a plugin can affect the performance of your site, it might be a good idea to disable all third-party plugins and compare the performance of the front end with and without plugins activated.
An easy way to do this is to run an SQL query in a test environment. Both queries shown below can be executed in phpMyAdmin and will disable a plugin that is not part of the default Shopware configuration.
Alternatively, you may want to use the plugin safe mode provided by the Plugin Manager from Shopware 5.3 onwards.
Once the store is running smoothly again, you can try to identify the plug-ins that are affecting your store’s performance by reactivating third-party plugins one by one. You can also reassess the need for each plug-in and tidy up your store’s backend a bit.
“Debug” Plug-in
Out-of-the-box Shopware comes with a “Debug” plug-in that can monitor and compare individual processes on a server. It will provide you with sufficient information on e.g. page request durations and will indicate processes, e.g. database queries, controllers, etc., that could slow down individual requests.
System Check
Shopware collects information about your system configuration and lists it in Configuration –> System Information. Here you will find entries like “memory_limit” (1). Exceeding the memory limit e.g. will harm performance. Keep in mind that memory limits can be changed and virtually enlarged, making a thorough examination of your system worthwhile.
Compiler Caching
By going to Configuration –> Theme Management –> Settings, you have the option to disable compiler caching. This is generally recommended during the normal production cycle of the store. Since compiler caching slows down a store considerably, it should only be used during development and infrastructure changes.
