Site Speed – Magento community, do not panic!
8 Comments 13th APR 2010 | Posted by Toni Anicic in Online Marketing
As Google announced that site speed finally became a ranking factor, the world of SEO was buzzing all around. People think their ranking positions with Magento stores will suddenly drop, but this will not be the case.
Magento community, do not panic!
1. Magento being slow is just a prejudice, a stereotype. Magento doesn’t have to be slow, here’s a tip on how to improve the speed of your Magento store. There are other things you can do to speed it up as well, just Google it. I’ve seen super fast Magento stores. It all comes down to the resource cost versus the functionality benefit when talking about Magento and it’s speed issue.
2. Rankings will not be affected a lot. Only ~1% of the index will be affected by the speed ranking factor.
3. Magento is slow when not optimized compared to some other e-commerce solutions, but not compared to the really slow sites out there that are the reason for Google’s implementation of this ranking factor.
4. This is just one of the hundreds of factors that Google takes into account when determining the ranking of a page, and it’s a minor one. Even if by some divine miracle this ranking factor affects your store, it will not pull down your ranking if other more important factors are better than what your competitors have.
5. The speed has been a ranking factor for weeks now (yes, before it was officially announced) so if you haven’t noticed a major drop in Google rankings by now, you will not.
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There are 8 comments (Add Yours +)
Meet The Inchooers, the funny bunch of magento developers.
April 13th, 2010 at 10:41
haha “I’ve seen super fast Magento stores.” links and benchmarks or it didn’t happen
in terms of slow we usually mean requests per second, currently the case is that no matter how much hardware you throw on magento application server your requests per second won’t increase as much as you like and even with 12 cores and 14Gigs of ram and cache in memcached it’s still slow as hell
April 13th, 2010 at 11:00
Peeter,
I can’t deny that some other e-commerce solutions can have much better speed. The point of the post is that it’s not likely that a well optimized Magento store will suffer penalty due to the site speed ranking factor.
April 13th, 2010 at 11:05
Magento suffers from the many many many layers of abstraction; but using the compiler a half decent VPS and the caching in 1.4 seems to give it a fair old advantage as well as setting your htaccess/apacheconf expiry, gzip and minifying your scripts etc; spriting your reused images… basically the crazy stuff you should do with any site.
April 13th, 2010 at 11:19
@Peeter
Benchmarks here:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/whitepaper/
Yes, true, that’s enterprise, but it shouldn’t be much different.
And yes, thats not some kind of independent study, but enough for me.
April 13th, 2010 at 11:29
Here’s another cool benchmarking, running Magento on two different servers and the difference in requests:
http://turnkeye.com/blog/2010/04/nginx-vs-litespeed-test-magento/
April 13th, 2010 at 11:32
Its also significantly faster on Lighttpd; the downside is that some bits require apache-modules (google checkout required mod-apache to authenticate … unless you hack it up *cough* not that anyone would do that)
April 13th, 2010 at 21:48
It is important to host your website as close as possible to your customers’ location and use fast DNS servers with low latency. These conditions are really helpful not just for point of website speed but for relevancy.
May 5th, 2010 at 14:32
Its gone some way to putting my mind at ease, we lost a huge chunk of indexed pages a week or so ago, but so did a number of other sites I have and use. I guess its Google’s way of purging.