One of the main reasons for a high bounce rate is a slow load time. If you use Magento to host your eCommerce website, then keep on reading to discover ways to make your e-store perform faster.
Combine CSS files and JavaScript files
You should consider merging your JavaScript files and your CSS files. This will speed up the performance of your Magento website. In order to do this, you need to head to System, then Configuration, then click on Advanced, select Developer, and finally, JavaScript settings. For CSS files, repeat the process but for the last step you are going to select CSS Settings.
Clean your database log
This is pretty self-explanatory. If you have too much data then it is going to slow down the website. Many site owners carry information on their database that they do not use and do not need. Find the time to clean your database log and you should note that your eCommerce website performs a lot faster.
Compilation Feature
Magento has a compilation feature. It is extremely beneficial. This feature can actually speed up your website performance by 25 to 50 per cent. All you need to do to take advantage of this is head to System, click Tools, and finally Compilation.
Don’t scale the images you use
One of the main reasons why companies suffer from a long load time is because they scale their images. Let’s use an example to illustrate this properly. Let’s say that you have an image of 99 KB with the following dimensions, 600 x 600. If you use HTML code to scale this to a size of 250 x 250 i.e. ‘height = 250 width = 250’ the problem is that the file is still 99 KB. Instead, you should actually change the size of the image rather than scaling it. By doing this, you will reduce the file size from 99 KB and, as a consequence, you will notice that your bandwidth and load time will be reduced substantially as well.
Upgrade to the latest version of Magento
The latest version of Magento evidently comes with better features and add-ons. Nevertheless, the performance is always enhanced with every upgrade too.
Caching configuration
Last but not least, the default-caching engine utilised by Magento is File System. This is actually the slowest caching engine. Magento utilises it because all servers support it. However, you can configure this to benefit from a faster website due to a quicker caching engine. Varnish cache is actually the fastest. Then you have redis cache, memcached, APC and finally, the default selection of file system.
So there you have it, some simple ways to speed up your Magento website and provide a better user experience for your customers.
