How to Improve Page Speed in Magento 2
Page speed is a crucial aspect of eCommerce that affects the user experience, conversions, and SEO rankings. A slow site will irritate your buyers and cause them to leave.
To make your Magento 2 site faster, there are a few things you can do. Here are some of them:
1. Use HTTP/2
HTTP/2 is the latest major upgrade to the web protocol, which improves page loading speed. It works by processing many static files in parallel on a single connection, instead of creating new server connections for every file.
It also reduces the number of requests to the server by allowing browsers to read JS and CSS files faster than before. This allows Magento to deliver pages faster.
In addition, HTTP/2 supports stream prioritization, which allows the client and server to send frames from multiple concurrently open streams on a single connection. This allows for better resource management and improved performance.
Another way to improve page speed in Magento 2 is by using a CDN, which helps you increase page load times by caching content on remote servers and serving each user from the nearest server to them. This makes it easy for customers from around the world to access your site at high speed.
2. Use Varnish Cache
A slow website can be a major annoyance for visitors. This is especially true in a competitive marketplace where users have limited patience.
To improve your site’s page speed, you can use Varnish Cache, a web application accelerator that “boosts” HTTP traffic. It also improves server response time and reduces bandwidth usage by caching content that has already been served.
Using Varnish requires some configuring, but it’s worth the effort as it can dramatically improve your site’s performance. You configure Varnish via its language called VCL (Varnish Configuration Language).
Using this language and its variations, you can set up a variety of rules for how Varnish handles inbound requests and their output. You can even instruct Varnish to respond differently based on certain properties or characteristics of a request. In addition, Varnish will continue to provide cached material in the event that the web server is unavailable due to a built-in feature known as backend polling.
3. Optimize Images
The page speed of a store depends on many factors, but one of the most important ones is how quickly images are loaded. If a picture takes too long to load, users will lose patience and leave the site.
Image optimization is a great way to improve page speed, and there are a variety of tools available online and offline to help you do this. These tools & extensions compress images without notable deterioration in quality and reduce their size, resulting in faster page loading.
Optimizing images also allows you to use a CDN to cache optimized images, which reduces the bandwidth required for each image download. This reduces the number of HTTP requests made to the server, which leads to faster page loads.
Another image optimization strategy is to enable lazy loading, which delays the loading of non-crucial images until a user actually needs them. It is a very useful technique to speed up the loading of product images on mobile devices and will help your site look more beautiful as well.
4. Optimize CSS
Magento 2 has a lot of different CSS styles that are used to build store pages. These are key components of how fast a page loads and how it looks.
However, they can be a real problem. If you have a large number of styles from external sources that are loaded before the page’s Javascript & HTML files, they can block rendering.
This can increase the First Meaningful Paint metric in Google Page Speed insight and slow down the page load. The solution is to select critical CSS styles while deferring non-critical ones.
Magento also has a method of merging & minifying JS & CSS files that helps reduce the number of HTTP requests to the server by combining JS & CSS. The Magento team has managed to lower the First Meaningful Paint from 3.5s to 2,3s using this function.
