Optimizing your store

To compete for consumer attention, your site needs to render quickly. Today's customers are not patient. They expect sites to "pop" onto their screens. They're eager to shop, but they don't want to slog through a site waiting for pages to render.

There are several things that can affect site speed, and they are as follows:

• The hosting environment: The setup of your web server is critically important. Be sure that you work with one that understands how to configure a server for Magento as the platform is demanding of resources. Cheap, shared hosting accounts usually don't work at all for Magento.

  Tip

  For most Magento stores, MageMojo (https://magemojo.com) is our preferred hosting provider. They only focus on hosting Magento stores. We use them as our sole provider because, in large part, of their excellent service.

• The theme code: Some themes, while pretty, are "heavy" in terms of how the code is constructed. Many include JavaScript...