With the proliferation of mobile devices, Google has started using speed and page load of website to determine search engine ranking as a more important factor than ever before. Google has gone so far as to create multiple testing sites to help you improve the speed of your website, and in doing so - as web developers - we must respond by taking note of what Google is investing time and resources in.

After almost ten years of deep delving into the beast that is Magento, I have learned a thing or two about a thing or two. One of the things that I have seen time and time again is that Magento can take a top notch web server and make your website crawl. The intense working behind the scenes of Magento is one of the huge drawbacks of using the beast, but there are ways to make the best of the situation. Some of the latest updates to Magento have given us some tools to make the beast appear as fast as any other website out there. Following is an all encompassing tutorial to make your Magento installation run as quickly as possible.

Magento Settings

Enable Flat Category & Products - Go to system > config > catalog and enable flat category and product for your website

Merge CSS & JS Files - Go to system > config > advanced > developer and enable merging for css and js for your website

Enable Compilation - Go to system > tools > compilation and enable compilation for your website

Enable Caching - Go to system > cache management and enable all caching for your website

Clean up Magento Logs - Go to system > config > advanced > system > log cleaning and ensure cleaning of logs for your website

Disable Unused Modules - Go to system > config > advanced > advanced and disable any unused modules for your website

Images

Compress Images - Use photoshop and or tinypng to compress your images to load quicker and increase page load times.

Template Images - All images used in your template should be compressed to the point that they are below 10kb.

Image Sprites - Use image sprites to minimize image load times.

Image Extensions - Use something like cloudinary or magento image optimization to make your images load quicker.

Magento Extensions

Full Page Cache Extension - http://www.extendware.com/magento-full-page-cache.html.

Yireo Disablelog Addon

Fooman Speedster

GTSpeed

Server Configuration

Select your web host carefully - Check speed of other sites on the server and compare to other web hosts - the web host you select can make a huge difference in the speed of your website.

Optimize MYSQL - Enable query caching.

Edit HTACCESS - Make use of gzip, expires, mod deflate, and output compression.

Clean MYSQL

Remove errors

Uninstall unused extensions

Enable keepalives

Reduce web server logging

Install php opcode - like apc or eaccelerator