Magento is a great open source eCommerce platform. Merchants love it for it’s full feature set as well as it’s ability to add-on features via extensions. One issue that a lot of people run into is the page load speed. Magento is very picky about the server set up. Here are some tips to help boost the performance and speed of your Magento store.

1 — Query Cache Size

Change the default Query Cache Size, it should be 32 or 64mb.

Magento Blog: Modify the configuration for your MySQL server to take better advantage of your server’s RAM. Most Linux distributions provide a conservative MySQL package out of the box to ensure it will run on a wide array of hardware configurations. If you have ample RAM (eg, 1gb or more), then you may want to try tweaking the configuration. An example my.cnf is below, though you will want to consult the MySQL documentation for a complete list of configuration directives and recommended settings.

Example my.cnf:

2 — Disable Access Time Logging

Magento Wiki: For Linux servers, if you have access-time logging enabled on any of your mysql, web server or cache partitions, try turning it off for a performance boost. If you’re using ext3 or reiserfs there may be faster journal write methods you can use. For more information see Linux.com.

3 — Enable KeepAlives in Apache

Make sure your Apache configuration has KeepAlives enabled. KeepAlives are a trick where multiple HTTP requests can be funneled through a single TCP connection. Since the setup of each TCP connection incurs additional time, this can significantly reduce the time it takes to download all the files (HTML, JavaScript, images) for a website. More information at Apache.org.

4 — Memory Based File Systems

Are you using a memory-based filesystem such as tmpfs? This helps Magento move faster because of all the reads/writes.

Use a memory-based filesystem for Magento’s var directory. Magento makes extensive use of file-based storage for caching and session storage. The slowest component in a server is the hard drive, so if you use a memory-based filesystem such as tmpfs, you can save all those extra disk IO cycles by storing these temporary files in memory instead of storing them on your slow hard drive.

For more in depth tips on how to boost performance on Magento, see the Magento Blog.

Image Credit: Viernest

Impression Share Report

Are you getting the most out of your keywords? Of the 100 people a day who search for Blueberry Pie, how many see your ad? There is an easy way to find out.

Under the reports section in Google AdWords, when you run a Campaign Performance report, it gives you the ability to select additional columns to add to the report. One of those columns is Impression Share (IS) Percentage Report. Just check of the option and run the report, you will now see a column showing what percent market share you are reaching. Additional columns are Lost IS (Rank), Lost IS (Budget) and Exact Match IS. More info on these columns can be found here.