Magento Hosting Optimisation Tips

Sep 19, 2011 · 2 minute read
Category: magento

If you are looking to gain the most out of your Magento hosting and to optimise your Magento hosting stack, here are a few top tips that you can try.

1. Ensure Caching is Enabled It may sound obvious, but if you do not have caching enabled then the performance of your Magento store is going to suffer massively.

Generally whilst developing, caching will need to be at least partially disabled to ensure that changes are reflected. Unfortunately some times when a site goes live, enabling caching is a forgotten step.

2. Upgrade your Magento More recent versions of Magento offer much better performance than earlier versions. If you are running a Magento version older than 1.4 then you should definitely look to upgrade as soon as possible as there are vast improvements to be made in terms of performance.

3. Disable or Improve Bad Extensions Some custom modules or forum inspired template hacks can be functionally fine but absolutely terrible in terms of performance. Fancy a best sellers list? Lets calculate the top ten products on every single page load and display the results in the right hand column!

4. Use Block Caching In order to deal with the above scenario, it is fairly easy to use block caching - something built into Magento as standard - to cache the html output of a block and serve from the cache rather than doing lots of heavy processing on an unnecessarily regular basis.

5. Move Hosts Some times you just have to accept that your hardware or hosting is no up to scratch. A well optimised LAMP stack can out perform an unoptimised standard stack by a surprising degree. Combine that with some choice extensions such as opcode caching etc and the performance difference can be really quite significant - and without any hardware upgrades. If you are running a VPS or dedicated server then it is possible to optimise the stack yourselves, or hire an agency like us to help you with this. Alternatively you can try to move hosts to a more specialist Magento hosting company that will provide this service as standard.