Website loading speed is a major factor when it comes to search engine rankings, retaining viewer interest and turning viewers into customers.   Although Magento is a fast loading Ecommerce website out of the box but there are many ways to tweak it for more speed. Increased speed can easily translate into more sales and better rankings in the  search engine result pages (SERPS).

One of the easiest ways to improve Magento’s speed is to add the Fooman Speedster extension. This extension is free and can be found here.  Load time after this extension is installed is vastly improved and is a must for streamlining your online store.

Another easy way to speed up Magento is to take out this line of code php_value memory_limit 128M which is found in the root .htaccess file. Eliminating this line of code gives magento more memory to work with which will improve page load times greatly.

Enabling Gzip on your server is another great way to speed up your Magento eCommerce site.  You can do this by updateing your .htacess file. First find “enable apache served files” in the file. Next change that code to the following:

############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip

# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

# Netscape 4.x has some problems…
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don’t compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don’t deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

Hold on to your hats!! Off you go! These  modifications and updates are sure to improve the performance of your Magento eCommerce website, convert into better standings in the SERPS, and result in happier customers and more visitors.