Magento Optimization

Magento Full-page Cache

An inquiry is sent to the server when a user accesses your store. PHP processes this request by carrying out particular operations and database queries before returning the relevant HTML to be shown to the user. The next identical request will immediately return that HTML answer since the full-page cache has already saved it, skipping all back-end processing and database queries. As a result, the website responds significantly more quickly.

Utilizing a full-page cache as part of your Magento optimization strategy will significantly speed up your website. Instead of doing all the queries on each request, this will create cached versions of your pages and provide them to the user. For sure, not every page is cached. The cart page, for instance, will not be cached because everyone else would view the initial cached version of the page. They are dynamic pages or sections, user-and session-specific.

To enable Magento full-page cache, you may run the following CLI command:
php bin/magento cache:enable full_page

The following CLI command is to enable cache types:
php bin/magento cache:enable

By logging in as an administrator, you may easily do it through the Magento Admin page:
php bin/magento cache:enable full_page

1. Access System > Tools > Cache Management
2. Choose the Cache Type you want to activate
3. In the Actions dropdown select Enable and click Send

Ensure Full-page Cache Works: It’s Easily Broken

In Magento 2, the full-page cache may be easily broken. For instance, avoid specifying a block with the attribute cacheable=”false” in the XML layout if you wish to prevent it from being cached. By doing this, the cache will be turned off for the entire page that includes that block, not just for that block. I have seen folks make that error.

Check your layouts for the cacheable=”false” attribute and note which blocks they are as well as on which pages those blocks are called. As a result, you can know if simple pages have cache issues.

You can manually check to see if your page has been cached. On your local or stage environment, put the store in developer mode:

1. Clear Magento cache
2. Load the page in the browser
3. Examine the page headers in your browsers debug network tab.
4. Search X-Magento-Cache-Debug: MISS
5. Now Refresh the page, as it should change to HIT

If it does not transform to HIT, the cache is not active, and the page is not cached.

CSS/JS Minification

The process of Minifying the CSS and JS files is a crucial factor of Magento 2 speed optimization. We eliminate all of the spaces, tabs, and newlines from the files by minifying them. Because the final files will be smaller in size and have fewer characters, they will download more quickly.

This function is already incorporated into Magento, and you can allow CSS/JS minification in Admin. To enable JavaScript minification, follow the steps below:

1. Put Magento on production mode
2. Access Stores > Configuration > Advanced > Developer
3. Set Minify Javascript Files option to Yes
4. Save Config
5. Flush Cache at System > Cache Management page

Enable Flat Tables

Depending on their type of value, the attributes of Magento’s entities are stored in different tables using the EAV (entity attribute value) Model. The data must be retrieved using various tables, joins and requests on numerous tables, which slows down the queries.

For the catalog and products, Magento gives users the option to use flat tables. All of an entity’s attributes are combined into one table to create flat tables. We just need to query one table when requesting the data, greatly speeding up the process.

With each indexation, Magento creates and updates flat tables. By logging in as an administrator to Magento Admin, you can enable flat tables:

1. Access Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Storefront
2. Choose Yes for Use Flat Catalog Category
3. Choose Yes for Use Flat Catalog Product
4. Save Config

Magento Image Optimization

Obviously, the size of your images affects how quickly your website loads. For instance, if a catalog page contains 20 products and each product image is 1Mb in size, the page will need to download a total of 20Mb when it loads, which could be problematic in some circumstances (mobile devices, limited bandwidth in certain regions etc.).

Make sure your images are appropriately optimized and have a good ratio between quality and size. Moreover, ensure that the source file for your images is scaled to the precise size you require rather than having CSS resize them.
Lazy loading is another option, which involves loading your images either after the page has fully loaded or while the user scrolls through the catalog.

For much faster content delivery, you can also use AWS or a CDN. Let’s quickly examine how AWS, CDN, and traditional hosting vary from each other in terms of bitmap optimization.

By going into Admin, you can also set the scheduled tasks:

Store then Settings then Configuration then Advanced
then System then Cron
(Scheduled Tasks)

Expand “Cron configuration options for group: index”

Use Elasticsearch on Catalog Pages and Search

Using Elasticsearch for catalog pages and search results is another option with which you can speed up your website. Connect your magento store to your Elasticsearch server after setting it up. Elasticsearch allows for considerably faster searching.

This official guide shows how to set up Magento with Elasticsearch.

Log into the Magento Admin as an administrator to set up Magento to use Elasticsearch:

1. Click on Stores > Settings > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Catalog Search.
2. From the Search Engine list, click Elasticsearch or Elasticsearch 5.0+, as the following figure shows. (The Elasticsearch 5.0+ option is not available for Magento 2.1.)

Redis for Page Cache and Session Storage

Zend_Cache_Backend_File, which is the back-end cache solution that Magento 2 by default uses, can be replaced by Redis.

So, Let’s Ask Why Use Redis?
Using Redis can have a variety of benefits:

• Redis can take the role of memcached since it can be utilized for PHP session storage as well.
• Memcached does not support on-disk save or master/slave replication, which is a highly requested functionality. High availability is made possible by replication, which prevents a single point of failure.
• As Redis operates by indexing tags in files, tag operations do not need a complete scan of every cache file.
• Without for-each loops, the back-end offers tag-based cache clean-up.

The major disadvantage is as follows:

• Since Redis is an in-memory store, all of your data needs to fit there, so it is just limited by RAM capacity and speed.

What about Configure Magento to use Redis for session storage:

Following you will find a sample configuration to add to <your Magento install dir>app/etc/env.php:

‘session’ =>
array (
  ‘save’ => ‘redis’,
  ‘redis’ =>
  array (
    ‘host’ => ‘127.0.0.1’,
    ‘port’ => ‘6379’,
    ‘password’ => ”,
    ‘timeout’ => ‘2.5’,
    ‘persistent_identifier’ => ”,
    ‘database’ => ‘2’,
    ‘compression_threshold’ => ‘2048’,
    ‘compression_library’ => ‘gzip’,
    ‘log_level’ => ‘1’,
    ‘max_concurrency’ => ‘6’,
    ‘break_after_frontend’ => ‘5’,
    ‘break_after_adminhtml’ => ’30’,
    ‘first_lifetime’ => ‘600’,
    ‘bot_first_lifetime’ => ’60’,
    ‘bot_lifetime’ => ‘7200’,
    ‘disable_locking’ => ‘0’,
    ‘min_lifetime’ => ’60’,
    ‘max_lifetime’ => ‘2592000’
  )
),

Here you can check all the details regarding the parameters and instructions on how to perform a quick check to ensure that  your Redis installation works well together with your Magento.

To configure Redis for the page and default cache, there are two methods. You are able to manually edit <Magento install dir>app/etc/env.php file or you can utilize the command line, which is advised because it additionally offers validation.

To access the default cache, run this command:
php bin/magento setup:config:set –cache-backend=redis –cache-backend-redis-<parameter_name>=<parameter_value>…

Determine exactly the parameters that are specific to Redis default caching.
Run this command for the page cache:
Php bin/magento setup:config:set –page-cache=redis –page-cache-redis-server=redis.example.com –page-cache-redis-db=1

Redis page caching is enabled by this command, the host is set to redis.example.com, and the database number is assigned to 1. On the Magento DevDocs, you can review all the information.