Magento 2 is one of the few revolutionary eCommerce platforms that has changed the way people run their online stores. It has outstanding features, responsive themes, a plethora of extensions, and much more to ensure your store operations are handled easily. Following that, a Magento store is expected to improve the user experience aspects of your business as well.
But, one thing that scares every eCommerce business owner, especially Magento users, is slow loading times. No doubt, you can hire Magento developer to get a very responsive store design, but at times, people consider adding too many elements to the store, making it load slower over time. This will hamper the performance and user experience of your store.
Therefore, you must hire professionals to not just get your store ready but also to optimize the TTFB (Time to First Byte) aspects. So, this article is all about educating you on how Magento TTFB optimization can help boost the overall performance of your site.
What Do You Understand by TTFB?
Before stepping into the details of Magento TTFB, it is important for you to understand the concept first.
TTFB is directly co-related to the rate of latency. You must know latency is defined as the time delay between a user putting up some request over a web app and receiving its first-byte server response. There’s only one way to measure this latency, and that’s through TTFB.
TTFB is better understood as the time taken by the browser to receive the first byte of requested information from the server. If there’s a slow TTFB, it indicates that there might be some issue with the server, which needs to be identified and resolved to prevent performance adversities. As per Google, the recommended TTFB for the websites should be at least 0.8 seconds or less than that.
When you hire a Magento developer, they will take this role of monitoring the TTFB over time and optimize it consistently to ensure a faster and more responsive experience for the users. Some of the ideal ways for optimizing or improving TTFB include:
- Reducing the server-side load
- Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
- Optimizing the server-side code
How is TTFB Responsible for Determining Magento 2 Store Performance?
When you are successfully done with the Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration, you might be busy exploring the features and performance upgrades for the store. But, in the meantime, it is also important to optimize your store to be able to improve the initial response time right after the migration.
Even though the platform features are sufficient to maintain the user experience aspect of your store, there are still a lot of factors that can adversely affect the overall speed or performance of the site in response to users’ requests.
TTFB is one of those factors! When a Magento TTFB is slower, you can imply that your overall store will be responding at delayed times to the users’ requests. Let’s try and understand the entire process in brief!
When users establish a connection with your store’s server, they will send a request through it. The server will then be processing that request, and a response will be sent to the user. In this three-way process, there are a lot of things that can affect the TTFB, which includes:
- Poor internet connection
- Distance from CDN
- Poor processing speed of the server
- Missing backend aching
- Slower database queries
- Networking problems
- Slower app logic
- Slower DNS response time
- Slower frameworks or routing
The higher the TTFB will be for your Magento store, the poorer will be your site performance. Therefore, the professionals have identified a few effective ways using which one can reduce the TTFB for their Magento store, which you will learn in the following section.
What are the Different Ways of Optimising Magento 2 TTFB?
As per the expert suggestions, here are some evident ways using which you can optimise the Magento 2 TTFB:
Server-Side & PHP Optimisation
The initial approach towards optimizing the Magento TTFB is by using the PHP code of your platform. This will help remove all the unwanted elements or chunks from the store functions. Most of the modules consist of a debug mode, which will prevent the overproduction of various log files.
It is always recommended for the Magento store owners to use the latest PHP version at all times, as it would help with better speed and easier code optimization. Each of the latest PHP versions consists of new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements.
Extension or Module Management
As Magento stores can be integrated with a plethora of extensions for added functionalities, there might be some that aren’t coded optimally or have dependencies. Therefore, disabling all of these extensions will reduce the overall memory consumption and further improve the TTFB for the Magento 2 store.
Following that, if there are any ineffective modules linked to deprecated functions, it is better to disable them. The logic will be simplified, and the server response time will be improved.
Implement Magento Caching
When you use caching, it will gradually decrease the TTFB of your store by suppressing the load times. Some of the hosting providers have built-in tools for caching, so you must check for that feature and use it.
If you are done with Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration, then you will be able to use only one of the two caching solutions, Varnish or Redis cache. Redis is accepted as a universal tool to handle caching at all times, whereas Varnish replaces Redis to support Full Page Caching.
Use SSL/TLS and CDN
CDN can turn out to be a valuable resource for Magento store owners to deliver content for users and scale the site speed. This would solve the user proximity issues at the origin server, which were caused due to the use of distributed server networks. Thus, it would reduce the overall time that it takes for the content to reach the users.
Parting Words
It might seem like improving the TTFB for your Magento store is a complex task, but with careful consideration of details, things will turn out to be easy. But, amidst managing all the core operations of the store, it becomes difficult to look after these integral tasks.
Therefore, you can hire Magento developer to consistently monitor TTFB and other performance attributes of the store. They shall identify and resolve the potential issues so that you can run your business uninterruptedly.