9 front-end pro tips to optimize your Magento store’s performance!

Dec 7, 2016 | Magento, Tech

Welcome to the second part in our 3 parts series, about the little knacks that you could implement to boost your Magento’s performance!!

Today, we’re gonna talk about 9 front-end tips for your Magento store, but if you want to learn more about the server knacks that you can implement, just follow the lead.

So. As we’ve said before, web performance is key when managing an e-commerce website. The speed of an online store is crucial for conversion and SEO, and thus profitability. We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again 😉

Without further ado, let’s quickly review together this list of front-end optimizations that you can easily make for your Magento website!

    1. Be careful with the order of your assets. For example, Javascript files block the download of the pages. So you should therefore place them at the lowest level possible. Because, even though our navigators are getting smarter, you can always gain some improvements from avoiding loading time.
    2. More requests = more loading time, so limit their number by using: concatenation (Gather your CSS/JS file together in a single file), CSS sprites (thus combining several images into one), parallelization (For this, you can distribute your assets into several domains. But not too many! Calculate DNS lookup time to make sure that you are not working at cross-purposes. Or you can also use a CDN).
    3. Use minification. It reduces the weight of the useless elements of your assets (e.g empty space, comments…).
    4. Use async directives as much as possible for your Javascript files.
    5. Use DNS Prefetch directives to avoid using too much of your browser’s resources.
    6. Delete unused Magento blocks (layout.xml).
    7. Use browser’s cache for static files.
    8. Compress your pictures.
    9. Adapt the width/height/weight of your pictures, in accordance with your users’ connection.

Remember that depending on your architecture, your hosting and/or your server, these solutions could bring disappointing results. That is why a monitoring tool could help you to prioritize the best-suited optimizations for you.

But if everything goes according to plan, applying these principles will let you experience a significant improvement in page loading times.

This list, of course, is not exhaustive. But it’s a start 😉 Feel free to contact us if you have any other performance-related tips to share with us!

And check out our 2 other blog post on Magento’s optimizations:

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