Guest post by PotatoCommerce 

The Magento 2 platform is less resource-consuming, much faster and optimized than Magento 1. There have been so many new features implemented in the new version. Now Magento 2 provides support for Varnish, Redis, Less and Nginx as well as full page caching out of the box.

Steps to Optimize Magento 2 Performance

Improved indexing system

Indexing is the process of data transformation in Magento to enhance the performance of your store. The indexing architecture is significantly improved in Magento 2, which allows the platform to run faster.

Full Page Cache

Magento 1 supports Full Page Cache module only for Enterprise Edition, while the user of Community Edition has to use various Full Page Cache solutions.

Let’s describe what Full Page Cache (FPC) does and why it is so important.

FPC significantly reduces the response time (Time to First Byte), and, consequently, speeds up page load. With the help of FPC you can make you store faster 2-3 times than with Magento, and allows reaching 50-200ms in server response time. The real Time to First Byte depends on the distance between a server and a client, how robust your server hardware is, and the current load of a web server.

You can check whether FPC is enabled in System> Tools> Cache Management.

The FPC settings are located in Stores> Configuration> Advanced> System> Full Page Cache

Varnish

Varnish is a free HTTP accelerator that is used on many platforms including Drupal, Wordpress, Magento, etc and aims at speeding up web pages on Unix servers.

To enable and configure Varnish in Magento 2, go to Stores> Configuration> Advanced> System> Full Page Cache and select “Varnish Cache” in the Caching Application option.

JS and CSS minification

You already know that Magento 2 has a feature to minify js and CSS files, but still, it is not such a perfect solution as everybody expects.The thing is, default compression functionality works only for 3 types of js files, which is less than 2% of the whole JS content.

Performance Optimization Tool by PotatoCommerce optimizes all the JS, CSS and HTML content on your store Magento 2 stores.

Redis

Redis stores all data in memory, which allows Magento to work with cache more smoothly. Thus, all types of cache, as well as our Full Page Cache, will work much faster with Redis.

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

In a few words, CDN stores the content of a website on different servers at once which are located in various geographical zones. Therefore, CDN delivers the content to a visitor much faster considering their geographical position.

If you are using Amazon S3 or Amazon Cloudflare, you could be interested in our CDN Synchronizer, which automatically synchronizes all the data between your  Magento store and CDN.

Image Optimization

Not only may slow websites appear at the end of the search results, but also your visitor can abandon the pages of your store. Thus, it is important too. For automatic optimization of JPG, PNG and GIF files, you need some powerful solution such as Image Optimizer extension Magento 2.

Magento Performance Toolkit

The Magento 2 developers improved the platform with a toolkit which checks the performance using Apache jMeter. This toolkit helps find and get rid of the weak points in the code. You can find Magento Performance Toolkit user guide here. 

Flat Categories and Products

To speed up your product collection you can enable the Flat Catalog Category and Flat Catalog Product option. This will allow creating new tables on the fly, where each row has all the required data about a product or category. Besides, the flat catalog is updated automatically every minute, or via cron.

Enable GZIP Compression

GZIP compression reduces the size of all downloaded files before sending them over to the browser. This allows significantly diminishing the transfer time. To enable GZIP compression on Apache, it is required to modify the .htaccess file, on nginx - in the nginx configuration file.

Keep Magento up-to-date

By updating Magento in time, you would have the most secure and fastest platform.

Keep an eye on Magento performance

If you want to sleep tight and do not worry about your web store, you definitely need Performance Monitoring by PotatoCommerce for M2. The modules check the current CPU load and alerts in case of troubles. Besides, you can see the detailed information on the load within a certain period of time to define which processes load the server most of all.

----

If you, by some reasons, lack resources or time to handle the optimization yourself, you can contact the guys from PotatoCommerce. They specialize in providing performance optimization of Magento 2  stores and will make the most out of your website.