One of the crucial factors of your eCommerce website is loading speed. A fast-loading website converts more visitors into customers and increases your sales.

In this post, we have discussed some of the steps on how to increase the speed of your Magento 2 website.

1. Update to the Latest Magento Version 

Ensure you are running the latest version of Magento. New releases often include performance improvements and other patches which affect performance. Hire Magento upgrade service provider if you don’t know how to upgrade the store.

2. Enable all Magento caches

Enable caching to reduce the number of database operations required for each page request.

Where: System -> Cache Management

3. Optimize your images

Compress the images before you add in your Magento 2 store. For products, you can use JPEG images, whereas PNG/SVG can be used for other images. Use a photo editor such as Adobe Photoshop to reduce file size.

4. Use a fast hosting server

Your hosting server needs to focus on time to first byte (TTFB) as it provides information on how fast the response from the server is passed to a browser request. In simple words, how speedily your server implements a PHP code. A good TTFB should be around 1s.

5. Make sure your third-party extension is up to date.

Keep the number of third/community extensions to a minimum. Many extensions introduce extra processing and database queries which harm the overall performance

6. Enable flat categories and products

Enable the Flat Catalog module for products and categories in the Magento Admin Panel. We have seen quite significant improvements by turning on this feature, especially on large catalogs.

Where: System -> Configuration -> Catalog

7. CSS/JS Minification and Merge

A JS/CSS “minifier” such as the Minify Javascript / CSS, which is made by a leading provider of Magento extensions. Minify JS / CSS will combine, compress, and cache Javascript and CSS files. Also, it will even add expiry tags forever to the data to ensure the fastest browser loading.

Why Should You Check Your Site Through Google Pagespeed Insights?

PageSpeed Insights shows the real-world performance of a page for mobile and desktop devices and also provide suggestions on how you can improve the page loading speed.

A Magento site with an excellent performance can also get an average PageSpeed Insights score. Though, one needs to understand that these metrics are not 100 percent accurate because Google doesn’t see your site the same way as your customers do. It does not consider the subtleties of eCommerce user experience and many other Magento quirks that deal regularly.

However, PageSpeed Insights is doing its best to analyze the store and accordingly provide actionable suggestions for any page.

As per PageSpeed Insights, What should be an ideal page speed score?

The score is displayed at the top of your PageSpeed Insights, and this report is generated by running Lighthouse, which collects and analyzes lab data about the page.

A score of 90 or above is considered fast, and score between 50 and 90 is moderate and below 50 is slow. You should take quick action if you get a score below 50.

What Can You Do To Improve The Pagespeed Of Your Magento Store?

Speed is essential to your sales and conversions, as explained above. If you want to get the best result, then you should invest quite of your time into analyzing, fixing, and debugging every Google page speed opportunity. We advise you to get in touch with a technical person as this process needs an expert level of technical knowledge.