We’ve been working with e-commerce platform Magento for a while now, and have found it to be a great fit for clients looking for an all-in-one e-commerce solution. However, the stock open source Magento is quite slow, and needs both good hosting and a number of plugins to really get it to where an ecommerce platform needs to be.

We’ve published a few speed guides as part of our work with our GTmetrix project, but for Magento, we went a step further and created a Magento plugin called GTspeed.

How It Works

GTspeed takes four key steps to improve Magento’s performance:

JS/CSS minification

GTspeed removes superfluous data like whitespace and comments from JS and CSS files, decreasing their filesize and speeding up their load times.

JS/CSS script combining

GTspeed merges all JS and CSS scripts into 2 single JS and CSS files, drastically reducing the number of requests sent to your server.

Enable Caching Headers

GTspeed adds headers which allow JS, CSS, and image files to be cached by browsers, preventing unnecessary requests.

Image Optimization

GTspeed uses lossless compression utilities to deliver all images in optimized formats. You can schedule automated image optimizations to ensure that no needlessly large files are ever served on your site.

Results

Installing GTspeed has an immediate and pronounced effect on Magento load times. Here’s a “before and after” breakdown of how GTspeed improves the load time of a default Magento installation, measured with our GTmetrix utility.

Detailed report on the improvements

Get GTspeed Working For You

Read more about how to install how to install and use our free GTspeed plugin.

GTspeed optimizes the front end part of Magento, but equally important is being on solid hosting. Please read more on our managed Magento hosting and the expertise our sysadmins can lend to your Magento installation.