Magento: Challenges of production operation

How to ensure that your Magento e-commerce project runs as it should.

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Magento is a powerful e-commerce platform offering everything you need to sell online. Besides the e-shop itself, it can manage stock, marketing, invoicing, and accounting. Currently, Magento comes in two versions: Magento Open Source (formerly Magento Community Edition) and Magento Commerce (for larger organizations with in-house developers).

Magento is one of the most-used e-commerce platforms and is consistently highly rated by users. However, in order to run Magento correctly it’s necessary to have a developer who is experienced with such applications as well as an experienced hosting provider who knows how to optimize servers for Magento.

The need for powerful hosting

As mentioned, it’s crucial not to underplay the importance of hosting when it comes to Magento. The platform is performance intensive and the hosting parameters must reflect that. Putting to one side the problems and errors within the application itself, the majority of problems with Magento are caused by a lack of power from the web server, or as the case may be, the environment where Magento is being run. Magento is slower and has a much higher volume of requests compared with other systems, but there are several ways to speed up the platform.

Speeding Magento up

Magento cannot usually run directly on the web server, but instead it’s necessary to use a caching proxy (currently only Varnish is supported).

If you wish to (as is standard these days) run a SSL version, it’s critical to put Nginx or another SSL terminator in front of the Varnish proxy. Regarding the web server itself, it’s possible to use Apache with a PHP module or Nginx with PHP-FPM. One of the most effective ways to speed up Magento is to use a PHP accelerator. For basic installations, APC is considered the best option.

There are therefore two possible solutions:

NGINX → VARNISH → APACHE (PHP-MODULE + APC, Memcache, Redis) → MariaDB

NGINX → VARNISH → NGINX (PHP-FPM + APC, Memcache, Redis) → MariaDB

For a larger installation, it is appropriate to use Redis for the cache and as a session handler. If you choose to run the whole installation on one server, it’s imperative to have powerful hardware or hosting which directly supports Magento. PHP, MySQL and Varnish will all compete for memory, CPU and IOPS.

Running Magento in a cluster

If you choose to run Magento in any kind of cluster mode (either because of power or high availability), Magento doesn’t account for this option by default. There are several ways to assemble the cluster:

The more complicated way is to use Varnish as a load balancer on each backend but then it is necessary to properly deal with cache invalidation and with other similar problems.
An easier way is to leave balancing to the Varnish cache, which is powerful enough on its own to be able to pass requests to several backends.

For cluster installations, it is also recommended to use a dedicated server for backend admin, for which, paradoxically, caching isn’t particularly desirable. For version 2 and below it is recommended that you enable the Magento Compilation function to speed up Magento storage.

Our experience shows that the most common instances of slowdown are a result of the following application errors:

44% SQL queries within a loop

25% loading the same model multiple times

14% using a redundant data file

10% calculating the field size at each loop iteration

7% inefficient memory usage

Conclusion: An experienced hosting provider and programmer will fine-tune how Magento runs

The advantages of Magento are that it is robust and universal. On the other hand, it is hard to ensure that it runs optimally. If you are considering using Magento for your e-shop, be sure that:

Your programmer has experience with the Magento platform
The hosting provider you choose knows how to fine-tune a server for Magento so that everything works perfectly without any loss of speed.

What Is Slowing Down the Loading of Your Website?

Website speed is essential for your online business success. Here’s what could be slowing your site down.

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Why website loading speed matters

Do you want to get as many visitors to your website as possible and have them stay there for a while? Then you need to make your site as fast as possible. Loading speed is one of the factors that affect how a site ranks in search results. In addition, the slow loading of the website is the main reason why visitors who have already reached the website will leave again quickly. And what if a slow or even broken website damages your business?

In addition, users are increasingly accessing the web from mobile devices, where slow loading is even more noticeable (and annoying) than on desktop.

Studies show that:

– 47% of users expect the page to load in 2 seconds
– 40% of users leave after 3 seconds of loading
– 46% of online users decide whether to return to the site based on its speed
– an optimized site should load within 3 seconds

How fast is your website?

Step 1 is figuring out whether you really have a problem with website loading speed. You’ll be able to assess that by using any of the following tools:

If you get a result of 3-second loading speed or more, we recommend you take a good look at why that is the case. There are many factors that can affect website speed. Here are the most common ones.

Major website slowers

Excessive website size

The larger the page, the longer it takes to load. The ideal page size is up to 3MB. Page size is affected by the number of images, videos, fonts, styles, and other graphic elements. If you have more than one image on the web, focus on compressing them. This can be facilitated by a wide range of plugins, such as Smush for WordPress.

No caching

Proper caching can effectively speed up the web. Caching is, simply put, the storage of information in specialized repositories, from where it is possible to work with them quickly, and therefore it does not have to be retrieved from remote servers.

One of the options is making use of a CDN. CDN is a network for faster content delivery. It helps speed up websites by storing static content (images, videos, HTML code,…) in key locations, reducing the distance between a visitor to your site and the server running the site. In addition, CDN storage works on the basis of fast SSD disks, thanks to which they not only provide a closer distribution of content to your users but also help in the speed of loading this content.

Too many HTTP requests

In order for a visitor to load your site at all, the visitor’s computer must establish a connection with the server on which your site is running. A large amount of data needed to display the site properly begins to flow through this connection. The more elements (images, icons, styles, javascript, etc.) you have on the website, the more connections must be established and the longer it takes.

The solution is to switch to HTTP/2. Unlike older versions of HTTP, which communicated in text form, HTTP/2 is binary and allows many more requests to be transmitted over a single connection. When switching to HTTP/2, there is an acceleration in the order of 100ms to 1 second.

We recommend that you ask your hosting provider if they support HTTP/2 and if your site also runs on HTTP/2.

Outdated application versions

Outdated versions of applications can slow down and even jeopardize your site. A large number of websites are programmed in PHP. However, there are big differences between the older version of the language (PHP 5) and the new version of PHP 7. The performance difference can be up to 50% and some functions in the newer version of PHP 7 are many times faster.

It is also very important to update the content management system and its plugins. An out-of-date content management system means a high-security risk.

Inappropriate hosting location

The more remote the server on which the site runs is, the more connections must be established and the more complex the overhead and the number of queries. For remote hostings, the communication speed can be in the order of tens of 100ms. So choose hosting that is close to the site visitors or use CDN, which we mention in one of the previous points.

Lack of readiness for traffic spikes

You’ve launched a campaign, a special promotion, or are running an ad on TV. A wave of visitors from various marketing channels is heading to your website. You’ve optimized everything for the most conversions and look forward to great results.
But have you thought about whether your site can handle it? Traffic spikes are great for your business as long as the hosting works as it should.

The fact that the website does not withstand high traffic is often caused by neglect of hosting preparations. Most often, the performance of hosting is underestimated and during peak hours it cannot handle multiple requests to view the website. Make sure your hosting provider is ready for peak hours. They should have a performance reserve and sufficient line capacity.

In addition to hosting, you also need to look directly at the application (your e-shop, catalog, website) and optimize the database. Make sure that the application does not make unnecessarily many queries to the database and that it does not happen to store content that does not belong in the database.

Summing things up

Website and e-shop operators often focus primarily on creating and caring for site content and optimizing the marketing funnel. However, their work can be ruined by hosting that is not optimized for speed, reliability, and security.

Although the cost of hosting is not one of the main items in the business, it is hosting that can ruin all the effort and plans. Therefore, it is necessary to host your website or e-shop with a quality provider who can advise and has tools for the smooth running of your business.