When an online store serves thousands of customers simultaneously, it is bound to act slowly. But, slowness comes at a price that may tune-up to billions in case of an e-commerce business as shoppers do not like snail-paced websites. Now, imagine the speed taking into account the fact that the store is selling thousands of products in hundreds of categories as well. It is a herculean task for any lightweight platform to maintain the desired performance and speed of the website. But, Magento 2 is not a lightweight platform as it is designed to serve thousands of users in parallel and supports up to half a million products on the store. This is not the only reason for people to hire magento developer. Let us look at some relevant features of Magento 2 to prove our point.
#1 Cron Job Queues
There are certain jobs like sending customer alerts, newsletters, Automatic currency rate updating, etc. which can be delayed during peak hours to avoid the performance bottlenecks on the website. Magento 2 supports the creation of Cron Jobs, which can be scheduled to execute in the future in a job queue, preferably when the load on the server is minimal. The basic thought behind this is to impede tasks that might hamper the performance of the store.
#2 Database Sharding
Magento 2 supports database sharding, i.e. creation of horizontal partitions in a database wherein each partition is called a database shard. Magento 2 supports three database shards for the product, order, and checkout data, respectively. This allows additional flexibility and scalability as these shards can either be hosted on a single server or distributed amongst multiple servers. Apart from this, one can set up slave databases for backups and load balancing. Database sharding ensures scalability and parallel functioning of the major jobs without losing on the speed.
#3 Supports Flat Catalogs
The product attributes are stored in different tables across the database. So, whenever the user searches for a product, data has to be fetched from multiple tables. The fragmented data increases the time for responding to each search request. Magento stores can be customized to create flat catalogs resulting in the consolidation of data and hence, fewer database queries. Flattening helps in speeding up the search queries. Although Magento 2 supports flat catalogs, the default settings of fragmented data can hinder its performance. So, one should hire best magento developer only to optimize their Magento store.
#4 Elastic Search Tool
Magento 2 can be customized to incorporate Elastic Search technology. Elastic Search can be used to boost the search features of the Magento store. It allows shoppers to search for products or categories in real-time. It includes the “Did You Mean” feature, which helps the shopper in finding a product even if it was misspelled. The “Spell Correction in Search” feature automatically corrects the incorrectly typed keywords. The “Synonym Filter” feature allows the shopper to search for a product by its synonym or regional language translation. The “Search Suggestion” feature suggests categories, pages, products, etc. based on keywords fed in by the shopper. Elastic Search guarantees a quick response to customer search results.
#5 Lazy Loading for Images
The page load time is inversely proportional to the number of high-quality images on the webpage. Magento 2 bolsters the speed by embracing lazy loading for images. Lazy loading feature loads images or any other heavy multimedia files only when it enters the viewport. It means that instead of loading the entire page at once, Magento gives priority to the visible content. New content is loaded dynamically as and when the user scrolls down. Lazy loading makes certain that the user experience does not suffer even at minimum bandwidth.
Final Remarks
Sluggish websites are a sight for sore eyes for the shoppers as well as the store owners. A store owner desires optimum performance from its store. Magento 2 eliminates all the performance inhibitors from the store, be it a job, search result, search query, image, or a catalog. Magento 2 is a platform that can be used for a heavyweight performance in terms of agility and the number of parallel transactions.
