Top 3 must-dos to make your Magento Community edition superfast

Introduction

We often hear customers complain about the slow performance of their Magento websites, so, in this post, we have decided to share three important tips to speed up your website.

Top 3 Important tips to speed up Magento

Like everything that comes free, Magento community Edition also has its own hiccups and slowing down is one of them.  Downtime is a major threat for eCommerce companies as they will have to lose valuable business, here are our top three important tips to speed up your Magento website.

Using the Latest Version

Using the latest version of the platform is one of the most important things to before you even begin your store operations. Latest versions will contain some major performance enhancements and bug fixes and will aid in improving the overall performance of the website. Here area fewsteps to upgrade your Magento installation.

1. Download a fresh version of Magento
2. Run the installer from the new download on top of the existing database
3. Move themes and custom extensions from the old version to the current version.

From time to time Magento sends updates and important information on major enhancements and bug fixes, you may keep an eye on these messages to keep your platform up-to-date. This not only helps you to speed up your platform but also helps you resolves other issues as well.

Cache Management

Magneto’s cache management system is an easy way to improve the performance of your site. Whenever a cache needs to be refreshed, a notice appears at the top of the workspace to guide you through the process. Follow the link to Cache Management, and refresh the invalid caches.

The Cache Management page shows the status of each primary cache and itsassociated tag. The large buttons in the upper-right corner can be used to flush the Magento Cache or the all-inclusive Cache Storage. At the bottom of the page, there are additional buttons to flush the catalog product images cache and JavaScript/CSS cache. After clearing a cache, always refresh your browser to make sure that you can see the most recent files.

Enable Flat Catalog

Magento has a unique feature called the Flat Catalog. By enabling Flat Catalogs, Magento tries to fetch product information from this new flat catalog instead of executing complex queries and SQL statements. This is a procedure is highly using for speeding up your website in case you have more than 1000 products.

Here are the steps to the Enable Flat Catalog:

1. On the Admin menu, select System > Configuration. Then in the panel on the left under Catalog, select Catalog

2. Click to expand the Frontend section. Then, do the following:

Frontend

a. Set Use Flat Catalog Category to “Yes.”

b. Set Use Flat Catalog Product to “Yes.”

3. When complete, click the Save Config button.

When prompted to refresh the indexes, click the Index Management link in the message at the top of the workspace and follow the instructions to reindex the data.

Summary

There are many ways to speed up your Magento Community Edition and these are just a few basics that you need to follow before moving on to more advanced procedures. Do let us know what has worked for you.