How to optimize the performance of your Magento website?

Here are some ways you can improve the performance of your Magento website.

1. Configure a CDN solution

2. Optimize and clean the site database. Check if you have log tables or other information you don't need.

3. Combine CSS and JS files

This can be done from the Magento administration panel and reduces the number of requests to the server.

Attention: if you use a CDN system, we recommend that you apply these settings when the traffic on the site is low; until propagation in CDN you may have certain display errors in the site.

To combine files:

• log in to the Magento admin panel - select System> Configuration> Developer
• in the Javascript Settings section, select Yes for Merge Javascript Files
• in the CSS Settings section, select Yes for Merge CSS Files
• clear the cache

4. Activate Flat Catalog

- activating this option will combine several tables; having a single table will improve the performance of the web site.
- we recommend activating the Flat Catalog Categories option for all Magento stores and Flat Catalog for Products for stores that have over 1000 products

• from the Magento administration panel, select System> Configuration> Catalog
• in the Frontend section -> Use Flat Catalog Category - select Yes
• in the Frontend section -> Usel Flat Product - select Yes
• clear the cache

5. Edit the .htaccess

Disabling ETags - ETags allows browsers to identify cached page components that are validated after each visit.

Rule for deactivation:

FileETag none

Enable Expires header (this option is not functional on LiteSpeed servers)

Expires header - define the duration of components that are cached. All components in a site should include Expires header especially images and static components

Rule for activation:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"

Enable file compression for static components:

############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip

    # Insert filter on all content
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    # Insert filter on selected content types only
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript 

    # Netscape 4.x has some problems...
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

    # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

    # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

    # Don't compress images
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

    # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
    Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

To make changes to the .htaccess file, connect via FTP and identify the .htaccess file from the location where your Magento website was installed.

If you encounter problems in applying the above instructions please contact us. HostX offers the best Magento web hosting service and can assist you in solving your problems.