Magento Site Performance Optimization

Preface
In the open source e-commerce platforms community, Magento has established itself
as the most popular e-commerce platform in the market. Indeed, it is supported by a
very strong developer community and it fits most of the usual and unusual needs.
The Magento Inc. website claims that Magento powers more than 2,00,000 businesses
around the world. That's a 62.5 percent progression compared to December 2012.
Even for a great open source and free application, 62.5 percent a year is pretty high.
This trust is well-earned, as dozens of worldwide companies use Magento in their
day-to-day online sales. Among the most known, we can find Nike or Lenovo.
From the beginning, there are two versions of the Magento platform: the Community
version and the Enterprise version. The Enterprise version has annual fees starting
from USD 17,000 (there was a hike of 21 percent from November 2013, which
is certainly related to the eBay acquisition of Magento in June 2013), while the
Community Edition remains free. Recently, a third version came out. This version is
named Magento Go and allows you to pay only for what you need. In this version,
same as in the Enterprise Edition, Magento Inc. takes care of the hosting fees and
bills you something ranging from USD 15 per month for 100 SKUs to USD 125 per
month for 10,000 SKUs. While the Magento Go Edition could be a credible alternative
to the open source one, considering that you will also have fees for hosting, it is
likely that the Community version is the most used.
The only problem with the open source, or Community Edition, is that if you own
a successful store, it will grow slowly—very slowly. When we wrote slow, we mean
over 3 seconds to add something in the cart and over 2 seconds to display a single
category overview. Why so? 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. Of course, all these problems go away if you are ready to
pay the hosting proposed by Magento Inc.
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