Speed Up Magento

Below are a few simple ways to speeding up your Magento website. We've put in place many tried and tested PHP and MySQL configurations to improve every website that we host, but there is a few simple things that can be done which should can speed your site up further.

Caching

Magento caching stores what would be a complicated script or calculation in to a flat file which is updated regularly. Good examples of these are Blocks and Configuration files.

Simply login to the Magento Dashboard, and select "System" then "Cache Management".

From here the cache management options are displayed, ensure all cache management is enabled and this will help speed up your Magento website.

After all the above options have been selected, choose "Save Cache Settings".

Enable Gzip Compression in .htaccess

A very quick and easy method to speed up your Magento website, simply enable Gzip compression in your magento .htaccess file. Gzip compression compresses and stores website files on the fly. When a file is updated or modified, a new version of the compressed file is created in its place.

To do this, uncomment this part in the .htacess: (Line 52)

#php_flag zlib.output_compression on
(ie Remove the # save and reupload)

Installing Magento

Below is a basic guide to installing Magento on your web hosting account. For competative prices on your Magento Hosting visit our services page.

1. Download the .zip or .tar.gz file from the Magento website and decompress it. We advise using WinRAR.

2. Upload the Magento web files to your web server via FTP. We advise using FileZilla.

3. Create a MySQL database and user/password for Magento. This can be done in Directadmin, which is our chosen control panel with all our hosting packages.

5. Ensure that the file magento/var/.htaccess, the directories magento/app/etc, magento/var, and all the directories under magento/media are writable by the web server. To do so, navigate to the directory with your FTP client. Then locate the function "Change Permissions" in your FTP client and select it. Once you find the function, you must set the permissions so the web server can write to this file. There are two typical ways of representing file permissions in Linux:

1. As a number (eg, 755)
2. As a series of permissions categorised into user, group, and other

If your FTP client uses the first representation, set the permissions on each directory to be 777, or 0777.

6. Use your web browser to surf to the Magento installation wizard. If you've uploaded the Magento files to http://www.example.com/magento/, then the wizard will be located here: http://www.example.com/magento/install/.

7. Once in the wizard, you can configure various system-level settings that are required for Magento to function. Most options will be intelligently guessed for you, but you're free to override any settings that don't look right. At the very least, change the database parameters in the first box “Database connection” to match those of the database you set up in Step 3.

8. Success! You've completed a basic Magento install. You can now visit the administration backend and begin configuring your new online store.

If your are a new Magento hosting customer and have an existing Magento site with another host, we can transfer your website files, database and email accounts free of charge.