Magento, a popular eCommerce software used to setup online shopping sites can be hosted on a shared hosting account, within a cloud server or dedicated server on its own. As you work hard to improve your website visibility online to get more sales, you should never ignore the importance to improve Magento websites speed. Through this article, several cloud server optimisation tips for Magento speed improvement is shared. 

For most Magento website owners who are on shared hosting accounts, your choice to improve speed is somewhat limited on the modules you can try. However if you are using either cloud servers or dedicated servers, you have more freedom to improve the speed from your server backend optimisation, apart from using the modules available for Magento. Here are some tips you can consider:

1. Use Nginx as the webserver

Most, if not all cPanel servers use Apache as the webserver. Apache is good and reliable but Nginx is a more lightweight webserver. If you host Magento on your webserver, to improve Magento websites speed, using a lightweight webserver will help you in terms of server performance drastically. Check out this post for in-depth comparison between Nginx and Apache.

2. Use MariaDB as the database

While more people are familiar with MySQL, there are actually a lot more benefits using MariaDB as the database, which of course includes performance improvement. Database is certainly an important aspect for as far as the topic to improve Magento websites speed is concerned!

3. PHP 7.x with OpCache

PHP 7.x is the best performance PHP version to date, and check out this link if you want to see the comparison in detail. In short, it runs 3 times faster than PHP 5.6 on the same server hardware. As you compile your PHP, remember to include OpCache to improve Magento websites speed even greater!

4. Redis for in-memory data structure store

To handle the backend session and page caching more efficiently, it is always a good practice to look into redis. This is usually an overlooked area when it comes to tips to improve Magento websites speed.

24/10/2017 UPDATE: Check out this post to find out how we speed up a Magento website by 122 times the loading speed!

SecureAX is a Fully Managed Cloud Server provider in Singapore which specialises in high performance and high security platforms. Contact us to find out how we can help you improve your Magento websites speed!