Index page in Magento is way too slow, what can I do?

Question

Weirdly, the index page of my magento commerce is very slow, while when you navigate the products, brands, searchs etc is very fast, but everytime you click on the banner to go for home or enter the website, it take ages to load

I wonder what can I do about this?
I don't know where to start, since I am new at magento. I thought I could go on and read the code, but that would take ages too, since magento is very big. Maybe I can analyze it somehow?

Thanks,
Jonathan

Answer 1

This has actually been my experience with Magento itself. It's a huge piece of software that is not known for being efficient or fast. At a web design shop where I used to work, we installed it for a few clients of ours. We were hosting everyone on our own monster dedicated server, so there were no noticeable issues at first. As one of the client's product catalog grew larger and larger (into the thousands of products), traffic spikes and certain operations (especially searching) would slow the whole server down in a very noticeable way and affect everyone. Looking at the server logs, there were times where Magento would run over 100 queries for a single page, run of out allocated php memory, or exceed script execution time.

We ended up having to purchase a new dedicated server just to move our 4 or 5 Magento customers to so other customers would stop complaining that their website was slow and so that we could bump up the connections, queries and memory limits. This got a little better with successive releases, but it was always a pain to upgrade because so many templates would change.

The only way I have seen Magento get faster is with faster/better hardware and dedicated servers or high end VPS boxes for each installation.

Answer 2

Not having seen your site, as a general approach:

Take a look at what is slowing down your page with YSlow and firefox. If there are large images or non-cachable media files causing load time, make them smaller.

Next, reduce the number of things happening on the homepage. If you are displaying products dynamically, for instance, consider moving those to static CMS assets if this would not cause too much trouble.

If neither of those helped, I would start removing things from the homepage to see if any one thing is causing thh slowdown.

Thanks, Joe