Optimising Magento for Speed…

Magento is probably the most powerful ecommerce software out there, however this comes at a cost, it is very power-hungry and Magento pages are rather large, often once customisation and images are added, pages can top 500Kb! Before you rush off and upgrade to a dedicated box, there are a lot of things you can do to speed up your installation.

The first is to host your site with a host that uses eAccelerator, this basically adds a layer of caching that enables the site to call off compiled files from the file system, significantly reducing overheads. Secondly, ensure that you have compression of JavaScript, HTML and CSS files enabled. By default Magento concatenates all your JavaScript files and if gzip is enabled the file will be compressed automatically. After some experimenting yesterday evening I found that the concatenation of the files saves about 7/8Kb compared to sending the cached files individually, so this would appear to be the most efficient methodology.

A warning to users of the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox, this compression is not picked up by the add-on if you use the Information > Document Size utility. However, Firebug does pick up the compression.

.htaccess file coming soon…