The Magento Speed Test

Anyone who has looked at using Magento in place of an existing system such as OScommerce or ePages has probably been blown away by the feature set on offer, but confused by the performance overhead, or slowness that they've seen with Magento when installed as standard on their server.

Certainly there is a speed overhead when using Magento and you need to perform a number of tweaks to the standard PHP and MySQL set up on your server. And this tends to preclude the use of cheap shared servers and even Virtual Private Server Solutions.

Take a look at how your store is performing by using www.webwait.com

As an agency that promotes the use of Magento, we are duty bound to recommend the right web hosting solutions for our clients. Solutions that are robust,safe and fast.

The gold standard has always been two dedicated boxes at Rackspace, one for the application layer and one for the database, and we have customers running solutions in this way that are lightning fast, but cost in excess of £1,200.00 a month to run. Fine if your sales are high and the number of concurrent connections are massive. But what about SME's and fast growing e-commerce companies?

Well we believe you need Magento to be flexible and run quickly but cost effectively. Enter the cloud...

STAR Digital have just run a test using a standard Magento installation on a Rackspace Private Cloud Server based in the London data centre and we've managed to get performance similar to a dedicated solution.

Results courtesy of http://www.webwait.com

In fact speed tests have shown on a site with 1100 active products that we are loading category and product pages in under 0.5 seconds. Click on the link or graphic above to view our Magento speed test for yourself. Hosted on a 4GB Rackspace Cloud Server it could be very cost effective, and with billing by the minute if you have very busy periods you can spin up extra servers while demand is high. A significant saving against a dedicated solution, and lightning fast.

If you want help speed ramping your Magento store, call or email us for more information.

Why is Speed So Important?

The speed of your web site is an important factor in reassuring first time users of your credibility online. Particlularly with e-commerce. Stores that run slowly often result in users 'bouncing' out or abandoning carts midway. All of which hurt your chances to make a transaction.

For brand sites it is becoming more important with the advent of rich media that sites need to load quickly and effectively. User experience is key, and again if a site is slow to load then there is a significant risk that users will 'bounce' and the opportunity to generate a lead is lost.