How to speed up a Magento website
Magento is a fantastic e-commerce solution used by a large number of notable websites both large and small. But despite Magento being a well designed platform, there is always the question, "can I make this even faster?" The answer is yes! It's important to be running your e-commerce site on a hosting server that can sustain large amounts of traffic and increases at certain times of day or time of the year, such as the upcoming holidays. A great way to help your hosting solution with increases in traffic and to improve the performance of the site is by incorporating a Content Delivery Network (CDN). There are several providers available to help you use a CDN with Magento.
Magento Plugin Options
Currently there is only one CDN plugin for Magento. And this plugin only rewrites image url's but not other static files that can also be accelerated through a content delivery network such as css and javascript files. The available plugin is great, and helps get your site up and running on a CDN in no time. It's available through the official Magento commerce site.
How Does it Speedup Magento?
A CDN accelerates Magento websites by offloading static files from the single origin server location and replicates the files on the CDN's edge servers. Edge servers are servers located at different locations throughout the world. When a visitor visits the website, they are able to download elements of the site from these edge servers which are closer to them than the origin host server. This makes the site actually load faster.
Why Use a CDN With Magento
So why does speed matter? Because the reports that have been released from companies such as Google, Bing, Shopezilla and more, show that website speed has a clear and measurable impact on how much money your site makes. A faster website has been shown to increase page views, conversion rates and top line revenue.