Setting up Magento? How to do it right

January 30, 2020

Magento is quite a popular open-source platform for websites, which is often used paired up with VPS hosting services. This makes both the user and the customer experience smooth and fast. While setting it up is quite easy, there are some additional steps that everyone can take that will boost the overall performance of the program and the system. Here are some minor tweaks that will help you out in the long run.

 

Magento

When it comes to the software itself, hosts can tweak a couple of settings:

  • Enable caching. Caching saves up precious resources like RAM so that it can be used for processes that need it. To turn this feature on you need to log into the administrator interface. Then find the storage management panel under “Cache Management”, select everything there and using the Actions menu, enable it.
  • Flat catalog. When activated, all product data will be stored into one table. This greatly improves the website and VPS hosting server performance.

Just enabling these two features is beneficial for the speed and availability of the system. But this isn’t the only thing that users can do.

 

The Database

A log clean can result in a striking improvement in performance and latency when it comes to the database. This is why it is recommended to do it regularly. One can do it by following these steps:

  1. In Magento, go to “Configuration” which is under “System”.
  2. Click “System” in the left menu which is under “Advanced”.
  3. Under “Log Cleaning”, select “Yes” for “Enable Log Cleaning”. Configure the “Save Log” for 15 days.
  4. Save the changes.

This system tweak will help maintain a clean log and improve the speed of the program.

 

MySQL

This open-source database is widely used for web applications in many VPS hosting services. Each time a page makes a query, it uses this system to access and retrieve the necessary data from the disk or storage media. When this happens simultaneously, multiple times, it slows down the performance.

To reduce this, MySQL has a built-in parameter called “query_cache_size”. By enabling it, the queries are stored in memory and not in a separate disk. Thus, faster access is ensured.

 

Additional tools

To further optimize MySQL, users can use some supplementary applications. There are many tools for image compression and script minification, which are quite useful because suitable picture formats and their compression affect the bandwidth. Reducing the file size is vital to improving end-user experience and faster page loading times.

More tweaks could be made to the system settings that will give the software and the VPS hosting server a boost. Besides the above mentioned Magento, database, MySQL, and additional tools, one can also consider caching, which also improves the platform’s performance. But just by doing these simple adjustments, a significant boost in speed and availability is guaranteed.