Magento Site 2.7X Faster & TTFB 24X Faster – Brick-anew.com Case Study

Brick-anew.com is an example of a website that was hosted by a company that specializes in Magento and claims to offer optimized solutions.  The slow speed concern was brought to our attention through the chat feature on our website.  Brick-anew.com was brought back on the right track after going through a hosting transformation.  Let’s examine the steps our team took to optimize this server so that we can fully understand how we achieved great speed results for www.brick-anew.com.

STEP 1 – WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DIAGNOSIS
The site was running at a slower speed from a general perspective and we knew that some further scope for speed improvement was left open for us based on our technical perspective.  The site was diagnosed and analyzed to find out the limiting factors which were slowing down the websites performance.

Lets look at just 3 speed reports prior to the migration to an eBoundHost Magento Optimized Dedicated Server:

1.  Home Page – Old Host                      Load Time: 6.015s    Time To 1st Byte: 3.067s

2.  Fireplace Doors Page – Old Host    Load Time: 5.407s    Time To 1st Byte: 2.271s

3.  Brick Paint Page – Old Host            Load Time: 6.008s   Time To 1st Byte: 2.245s

Initial Testing
We offered to benchmark the store on our platform prior to making any changes to the current site.  What this means is that we created a mirror copy of brick-anew.com and placed it on our server so that we could compare the 2 sites side by side.  Here are the initial results.  The test site loaded in only 3.8 seconds.

What eBoundHost Provided
We provided Brick-anew.com with a dedicated server, using hardware RAID-1 drives (SSD), 16 GB of RAM, and a top end Intel Quad Core e31230 v2@3.3GHz CPU.  RAID-1 was used for superior I/O (disk) performance, 16 GB of RAM was used for proper caching (MySQL).

The results were great, but as a group we decided to add Varnish & NginX to the equation and do some more optimizing.  The load times went down even further:

1.  Home Page, Optimized –                    Load Time: 2.222s    Time To 1st Byte: 0.125s

2.  Fireplace Doors Page, Optimized – Load Time: 2.542s    Time To 1st Byte: 0.139s

3.  Brick Paint Page, Optimized –          Load Time: 2.938s    Time To 1st Byte: 0.180s

CONCLUSION:
Thanks to properly configured Varnish cache, Nginx, and image optimizations www.brick-anew.com is now in the top 1% of fastest sites on the web.

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – Brick-anew.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Jarett E.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.

Tom P June 20, 2014