Improve the Speed of Your Magento Site

I’m finding all sorts of crazy little finds recently with regardsto improving numerous of aspects of Magento, and today I’m focusing onspeed.

Obviously, speed is of the essence when you’re hosting your Magentosite. The E-Commerce platform is pretty resource intensive. Some peoplehave been complaining of slow speeds, and things just taking a littlebit too long. Well, considering users make up their minds about aweb-site within the first five seconds, load time is crucial.

I found a handy Magento Speed Test tool, where you can enter a URLand see how fast it pings from various computers across the world. Ihave pinged an installation by Simple Helix, the Magento specialists- and all of the locations which ping the Simple Helix server whichcontains the Magento installation, come up with good speeds.

So, when choosing a Magento host, you should really use this tool inorder to decide if their speeds are good enough. It’s almost worthasking the company (before you sign up with them), to show you aMagento installation somewhere so you can ping it using the mentioned Speedtest service.

UK based NuBlue Magento Hostingare another company to have used this service to demonstrate how goodtheir servers are. Again, they ping very well, and their exampleMagento installation, which is available to see through their website,shows quick speeds!

In terms of speeding up your web-site, whack…

php_value memory_limit 128M

.. in to the .htaccess file in the root. This will help to ensuethat the memory that PHP has access to is not exhausted, and you shouldsuffer less hangs and more speed.

Other speed tips include making sure Magento caching is turned ON inAdmin, ask your server host to enable MySQL Query caching, and enablingGZip COmpression in the .htaccess will certainly give it a boost too.You can do this by finding “enable apache served files” in the file,and then changing the chunk of code to the following…

############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip

# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

# Netscape 4.x has some problems…
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4/.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch /bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don’t compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI /.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don’t deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

Best of luck!