Preface

In the open source, e-commerce platforms community, users and developers have only one word to say: Magento! Indeed, in a short period of time, Magento has established itself as the most popular e-commerce platform in the market. Moreover, many developers create Magento extensions that can fit most usual and unusual needs.

Magento Inc. claims that they are trusted by more than 125,000 businesses, including some major brands such as Nike and Lenovo and was downloaded over 3.8 million times. From the beginning, there are two versions of the Magento platform, the Community and the Enterprise version. The Enterprise version has annual fees starting from USD 14,000 (December 2012), while the Community edition remains free. It is likely that the Community version is the most used of both.

One hundred twenty-five thousand merchants all around the world and 3.8 million downloads are quite impressive statistics, but how to explain the gap between people who try to create their own businesses and people who actually have a profitable e-commerce out there? Magento is an advanced e-commerce platform, and advanced also means a complex platform. Like any complex platform for online businesses, Magento configurations must evolve to fit new user requirements and operational needs. The changes resulting from the increasing number of browsers and buyers may degrade the quality of service and the user experience of any e-commerce website. The optimization of an attractive commercial website is a nontrivial task that deserves time and knowledge. Moreover, the optimization is a critical point for all growing businesses, because a misconfiguration could make you lose money, a lot of money. Indeed, if your server is overloaded, even for a short period of time, a browser that wants to turn into a buyer will not be able to do it; and it's good to know that, on an average, a dissatisfied customer will talk to twelve people about his bad experience while a satisfied customer will only talk to three.

There are numerous other causes that lead to giving up Magento or making you lose money, such as getting lost inside the tons of files, being disturbed by the massive object programming style, or becoming tired of trying configurations found online that do not work. However, we will focus on performance optimization.

Despite all these traps, the good news is that there are hundreds of people like you and I, who have made their own mistakes, created best practices, and shared all this knowledge on the Internet.

Instant Magento Performance Optimization How-to has been designed to be a reference for administrators and developers on how to turn your businesses into performances, by reducing a huge amount of time in online research and unsuccessful attempts.

Although the optimization is a nontrivial and complex task, I want this book to be easily accessible for anyone who wants to speed up his Magento; that's why I have spent dozens and dozens of hours in researching, testing, and building simple step-by-step tutorials.

This book will focus on the latest release of the Magento Community Edition, Version 1.7. Various tricks and tips exposed in this book will certainly work with earlier versions, especially Version 1.6, but I can't guarantee it for all of them. Moreover, if your Magento Community version isn't the latest one, we recommend as a first step to upgrade it for optimization, security, and innovation reasons.