Speed up Magento with these simple admin settings
July 11, 2011
When you’re ready to go live with your Magento store, remember to setup your admin for maximum performance! These are the settings that will significantly speed up your Magento installation:
1. Enable cache
Most users are well aware of this one 
.
Just navigate to System > Cache Management and enable all cache types.
Magento Cache Management
2. Re-index data
Regularly indexing Magento data will also have some impact on performance.
Under System > Index Management select all indexes and hit the “Reindex Data” submit button.
Magento Index Management
3. Enable JavaScript file merging
Combining all JavaScript files into one will greatly reduce the number of HTTP requests your Magento site makes to the server and will have a nice impact on speed.
Navigate to System > Configuration > Developer > JavaScript Settings and select “Yes” under “Merge JavaScript Files”.
Combine All JavaScript Files
4. Combine CSS files
Like with JavaScript files, combining all CSS files into one will reduce load time and increase speed. Magento also has an admin setting for that but we don’t recommend turning it – it is much better to use Ultimento’s Magento themes which are truly optimized for speed. In Ultimento there is only 1 combined CSS file that is also compressed and minified.
If you’re not running Ultimento, you can combine all CSS files into one via the Magento admin:
Go to System > Configuration > Developer > CSS settings and select “Yes” for “Merge CSS Files”.
Combine All CSS Files
5. Turn off the logs
On a production Magento installation make sure all logs are turned off!
The settings are under System > Configuration > Developer > Log Settings.
Magento Log
6. Enable the compilation
Magento’s compilation is a great tool to speed up a production installation.
Go to System > Tools > Compilation and hit “Run Compilation Process”.
Magento Compilation
Of course there’s many other things besides these admin settings you can do to speed up your Magento store! The most important is to:
- Use a Magento theme that is truly optimized for speed
- Host your store on a Magento optimized server
- Don’t load your Magento installation with too many extensions
But the admin configuration is so commonly overlooked yet so easy to apply!
Nice and very useful post. Thanks.
Hi! I have one store on Magento, but I’m planning to create 2 or more stores for different countries. But I’m not imagine how to manage all my future stores at the same time. Any suggestions?
Hey Magento Commerce,
If each “country” is going to have its own currency and its own language then you can just use different stores for each currency and each store can have it’s own store view for the language. If you aren’t worried about currencies and it’s just a language issue then you really only need one store and as many store views as you have languages. Either way, products/homepages/etc. can all be mapped to one set of products so that should help keep things manageable.
It can definitely get complicated tracking all the different versions of sites Magento can support, but the above is considered standard practice and will keep you as organized as possible.
Thanks,
Support