February 19, 2026
Optimising Magento site speed and performance should be at the top of any business owner’s priority list. Why? Because with today’s customers, every second counts. In fact, 53% of visitors leave mobile sites when pages take longer than three seconds to load. Slow sites don’t just irritate customers, they also hurt your Magento site’s user experience (UX) and SEO rankings, especially now that site speed is a key ranking factor in Google’s Core Web Vitals testing.
Magento site optimisation helps avoid these issues, in turn boosting your sales and conversions. In what follows, we’ve put together 8 essential tips to help you (or your developer!) optimise Magento speed and ensure your site is built to perform, however your eCommerce store is set up.
How can you test your Magento speed and performance with Core Web Vitals?
Before making any changes, we advise running a Core Web Vitals test. Ask your developer to check for speed issues and improvements using tools like PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix. These give you a baseline to measure progress and highlight any areas holding your site back.
Once you’re done, follow these 8 Magento performance optimisation tips.
1. Enable All Magento Cache Types and Use Varnish
Magento comes with several built-in caching options. Enabling these is one of the quickest ways to boost site performance. Our recommendation? Varnish, a powerful caching tool that significantly reduces page load times by storing a version of your website in memory.
This means repeat visitors won’t need to reload every page element, saving you time, server resources, and reducing abandoned purchases.
2. Enable Redis for Session and Cache Storage
In addition to Varnish, we recommend that your developer enable Redis for session and cache storage. Redis helps offload database strain by storing sessions and cache in memory, which speeds up data retrieval and reduces server load.
Why Varnish and Redis? This combination improves both Magento site responsiveness during traffic spikes and backend performance. Net result: a smoother experience for users and administrators.
3. Choose Magento Specialist Hosting
Magento is a resource-intensive platform, so it benefits hugely from dedicated, optimised hosting environments. For this reason, consider switching to a Magento specialist hosting provider like Hypernode, UKFast, or Corefinity. Unlike ‘we do everything’ providers, they’ll know the platform inside and out, and can offer support and infrastructure tailored to Magento performance optimisation.
Bonus tip: make sure your current provider has enabled either Varnish or Redis, and that they’re using the right server capacity for your traffic.
4. Use a CDN Like Cloudflare
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) stores your site’s static assets (like images, CSS, and JS) on multiple servers around the world. When customers visit your site, the assets load from the nearest server, reducing latency (load time) and improving your Magento Core Web Vitals scores, all of which help your sales margin.
At Develo, we use Cloudflare because it’s simple to set up, reliable, and has a generous free tier.
5. Switch to ‘On Schedule’ Indexing
Magento lets you choose when data is indexed, either immediately (‘on save’) or ‘on schedule’. For most stores, ‘on schedule’ indexing is faster and more efficient, reducing admin load and improving user experience (UX), especially for customers browsing large product catalogues.
6. Optimise Images and Lazy-Load Below the Fold
Does your Magento site have large images? If so, they may be slow to load. To correct this, advise your developer to implement lazy-loading for images that appear further down the page (‘below the fold’) and use formats like WebP. This reduces page weight, improves your Core Web Vitals test scores, and, most importantly, keeps your conversion rates on track.
We recommend tools like Yireo Webp2 to automate this process. Also, consider hosting videos externally (on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo) where they're optimised for delivery.
7. Review and Reduce Third-Party Scripts
Another way to optimise Magento speed is to review (and, if necessary, remove) site extensions and third-party scripts, especially those added via GTM or directly into Magento. Rooting these out is easy with Chrome DevTools or GTmetrix, and will improve site load times.
Remember: if a script is only required on a single page (such as a PDP or checkout), there’s no need to load it sitewide.
8. Clean Up and Optimise Your Magento Database
Task your developer with regularly cleaning and optimising your Magento database. This will stop unused data, including logs and expired quotes, from building up over time. This will improve your Magento site’s optimisation and speed up customer queries.
Bonus Tips for Magento 2.4 and Beyond
Use Hyvä Themes: The Magento 2 Hyvä Theme is an excellent choice for business owners seeking faster-than-Luma speeds and outstanding Core Web Vitals test results. The theme enhances web performance, reduces developer complexity, and improves UX. It’s a smart, future-ready upgrade for any Magento store.
Test regularly: Run monthly speed tests using tools like GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, and WebPageTest.
Magento Site Optimisation: Final Thoughts
Magento site optimisation is an ongoing investment. With the right setup and regular reviews, you can keep your store fast, secure, and ahead of the competition, as demonstrated by our work with Bamford.
Last updated: February 19, 2026
