12 Tips from Pros on How to Make Magento 2 Run Faster

The main points are:

• Up to 7% of people who visit a Magento page will leave if it takes even one second longer to load. Making things faster has a direct effect on making money.
  
• First, check Magento’s performance to find places where the database, extensions, hosting, and caching are taking too long.
  
• Core Web Vitals go up when you switch from Luma to Hyvä’s light frontend. Load times often drop by more than 50%.
  
• For Magento 2 to load faster and get better SEO rankings, you need to use Varnish or Redis for caching, add a CDN, and reduce the size of JS and CSS files.
  
• Thanks to ongoing monitoring and audits every three months, your Magento store stays fast even as the number of visitors, SKUs, and integrations grows.
  
• Improving speed is a way to get more people to click on ads, which improves user experience and search visibility.

Think about the last time Netflix paused just before a big scene. That’s not what you did—you probably got mad and did something else instead. That’s how people feel when your Magento 2 store takes too long to connect.

People leave your site quickly after every extra second, which wastes money on ads and keeps people from buying. The worst part is that they will go straight to your competitors’ faster site.

More than just the user experience is changed by it. Google now ranks sites based on how fast they load. This means that a Magento site that loads slowly not only hurts sales, but it also hurts your search engine ranking, which means fewer people will visit your store before it even opens.

There is only one thing left to do: spend money to speed up Magento 2. Switching from Magento’s heavy Luma theme to Hyvä, a modern frontend that is light and made to be fast, is one of the fastest ways to do that. With Hyvä, load times are cut by a huge amount. Core Web Vitals also works better, and clicks that would have been wasted become paying customers.

This guide will show you 12 professional ways to speed up Magento 2. These include making the front end more responsive and setting up caching and a content delivery network (CDN). It will help your store run quickly, handle a lot of people, and give your customers the experience they want.

Why is speed so important for business-to-business and enterprise stores?

There are a lot of visitors to Magento sites for businesses and organizations because they have complicated catalogs and unique ways to buy things. Magento website optimization makes the site work better on mobile devices, speeds up the process from quote to checkout, and makes the user experience better for busy people who have to make decisions. If your store is slow, potential customers and people who have bought from you before can go to a lot of other stores.

There are 12 expert steps, and the next part will show you each one. There are fixes that you can use right away, suggestions that are full of keywords, and real-world performance tips. This makes sure that the content on ads and landing pages for getting leads is complete, clear, and stays on the page. Let us know if you need any changes or if you agree to go ahead.

Here are 12 tips from experts on how to speed up Magento 2.

Step 1: See how well Magento 2 works right now.

You can’t make something better if you can’t measure it. A lot of Magento stores fix little issues all over the place instead of finding the main issues.

As a first step, compare key performance indicators (KPIs):

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) shows how fast your main content loads.
  
• Your server’s Time to First Byte (TTFB) shows how fast it responds.
  
• Total Blocking Time, or TBT, is the amount of time that scripts stop people from using a site.
  

Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Magento’s built-in profiler can help you find slow queries, assets that aren’t optimized, or third-party scripts that are too heavy.

Look at how each fix will affect sales to figure out which ones are the most important once you have a clear picture. Like, a blog page that loads slowly hurts sales a lot more than a checkout page that loads slowly. Once your Magento is running smoothly, you can make plans for what to do next.

Not sure how to do a full audit? Our team will give you a FREE audit to help you figure out what’s stopping you.

Step 2: Choose a good servers and hosting service.

Any changes you make must work with fast hosting. To work at its best, Magento needs dedicated infrastructure that is well-tuned and doesn’t waste any resources.

Choose a host that:

• Only your own resources (do not use shared hosting).
  
• It has SSD storage and works with PHP 8+.
  
• Built-in caching (Redis, Varnish).
  
• Automatic scaling for times when it’s busiest.
  

Business-to-business (B2B) or enterprise stores should think about cloud hosting or containerized environments like AWS, GCP, or Kubernetes for reliable to scale performance.

Remember that even a 200-ms server delay can slow down the speed at which pages load and customers check out.

Step 3: Enable Advanced Caching (Full Page Cache, Varnish, or Redis).

Magento has to build every page from scratch, which takes time. It’s fixed by caching, which saves pages that have already been made and sends them right away.

Pay attention to these three types of caching:

• Full Page Cache (FPC): This lets you return more quickly.
  
• Varnish: It’s good at handling a lot of traffic, which makes the server less stressed.
  
• Redis: Speeds up how databases work and how sessions are handled.
  

Your store can handle traffic spikes without breaking if you use the right caching. It can cut load times by up to 50% and save you money on server costs. This is an easy way to speed up Magento 2 that works well.

Step 4: Pick a theme that is quick and light.

The front end of your Magento site is likely the most important part. While the Magento Luma theme’s many features make it useful, the large size makes it slow to use.

Using a light theme like Hyvä can make things run much faster right away. Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS are used by Hyvä. These make JavaScript much lighter and faster to render. Right away, most stores have load times of less than two seconds.

It’s not just Core Web Vitals that works better when the front end is fast. Less people leave the site right away, more people buy something, and each dollar spent on marketing has a bigger impact.

Step 5: Take better care of pictures and videos.

Most of the time, pictures take up more than half of the weight of a page. They slow down everything if they aren’t set up right.

The best ways to:

• You can reduce the size of images without losing quality if you use WebP or AVIF.
  
• Use pictures that will look good on a range of screens.
  
• That way, images will only load when they are needed.
  

Check the videos, GIFs, and banners for the product as well. Even one media file that is too big can slow things down. One of the best and fastest ways to get your Magento 2 site to load faster is to make your images work better together.

Expertise is needed to make Magento work better. Want store-specific advice? Set up a 30-minute meeting with our CEO to figure out how to get things done faster.

6. Combine, shrink, and wait for the JS and CSS files

Having JavaScript and CSS is important, but rendering takes longer when there are too many or too large of them.

• Get rid of characters in code that aren’t needed by minifying it.
  
• Merge: Put together several files into one request.
  
• Scripts that aren’t needed should be put off so that content above the fold loads first.
  

There are fewer network requests, and the scores for Time to Interactive (TTI) and First Contentful Paint (FCP) go up. Because of this? There should be a website that looks good and works well on all devices, even phones.

Step 7: Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

If your clients are in different parts of the world from your server, distance will hurt you. This is taken care of by a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which stores static assets on servers all over the world and sends them to users from the location that is closest to them.

This lowers latency, speeds up time to first response, and makes sure that all buyers get the same level of performance. CDNs, such as Cloudflare, Fastly, or Akamai, work well with Magento and make pages load much faster with very little setup.

Step 8: Get important files ahead of time and load them.

Even after caching and compression, browsers still need to be told what to load first. When you prefetch and preload, you show them the way.

• Browsers are told to get resources they will need soon by prefetch.
  
• Important files, like hero images or key scripts, are set to load right away when you click “Preload.”
  

These small changes will make a big difference in how quickly pages load for your users. They work great on phones, even though bandwidth and latency are limited.

Step 9: Keep any extra hair thin and neat.

When you add optimized extensions, they add features, but they also make the list longer. Too many plugins with bad code will make your site load more slowly or not work right, or they will load scripts you don’t need.

Check all of the extensions that you’ve installed:

• Get rid of things that you don’t need.
  
• If some plugins are too heavy, switch them out for lighter ones.
  
• Check the ones that are still there to make sure they are up to date and will work with your Magento version.
  

In this case, less is more. It takes less time to run, is more stable, and is easier to maintain in the long term with a lean extension stack. All of these are important if you want to grow your store quickly.

Step 10: Clean up the Magento logs and fix the database so it works better.

Your database will grow as your store does. Databases that are too full are a major cause of things running slowly.

• Clear out your cache, sessions, sales, and customer logs often.
  
• Fix up database tables to make it faster for them to answer queries.
  
• You can either keep old orders and data that you no longer need or get rid of them.
  

It is faster to search, see products, and do other back-end work when databases are well taken care of. This is very important for business-to-business sites that have giant catalogs and queries that are hard to understand.

Want to know more? Look at our page just for the Hyvä platform to see how we help brands use it to get better speed and ability to grow.

Step 11: Make the checkout process faster and use fewer HTTP requests.

Sites make money at checkout, but they also lose customers there. People are more likely to leave if the checkout process is slow and has a lot of steps. This wastes your ad spend.

Simple steps can help you follow it:

• Getting rid of some steps.
  
• Putting together third-party scripts and putting them off.
  
• CSS, JS, and sprites can be used together to cut down on HTTP requests.
  

Making the checkout process easier has a direct effect on revenue because it leads to more sales. Every month, thousands more sales can be made with just a 0.5-second speed boost.

Step 12: Check on things often and let people know what’s going on.

Getting the speed up is something you do all the time, not just once. As time goes on, Magento itself changes, as well as the ways that people visit the site.

Make sure that tools like New Relic or Blackfire are always running to keep an eye on real-time performance and catch regressions early. As performance keeps getting better, make sure that your server, Magento, and PHP software are all up to date.

It’s a lot like taking care of your money-making machine. You can keep your Magento 2 site fast even if your catalog, traffic, or integrations grow. All you have to do is keep making it better.

Extra Tip: Get a Magento performance expert who has done a lot of work.
If you follow these steps correctly, they will work. Caching or assets can break things and make the user experience worse if you set them up too much.

Every step is done right when you work with a Magento performance optimization expert like HumCommerce. Our team can help you speed up Magento 2, get more sales, and make your store a growth machine. We can do everything from full audits to Hyvä migrations and file-level tuning.

That being said

Speed is what makes eCommerce grow. Every millisecond you save helps your SEO, boosts sales, and gets the most out of the ads you spend money on. Speed is even more important as stores get bigger. A site with more SKUs, more traffic, and more data needs to be built to work.

You can speed up Magento 2 and get your whole storefront ready for the future by following these 12 steps. When you make changes, like using Hyvä and fine-tuning your database or making your hosting and caching layers work better, your pages load faster, your customers are happier, and you make more sales.