6 Common Magento Performance Issues and How to Fix Them

June 4, 2025

Is your webstore suffering from Magento performance issues like slow load times or poor performance? These issues can severely affect site speed and user experience. Common problems like delayed page loads, inefficient databases, and unoptimized code frustrate customers and lower conversion rates. By addressing these performance bottlenecks, you can significantly improve your store’s speed, stability, and customer satisfaction. The best way to maintain your Magento website is to perform regular site maintenance or subscribe to a Magento maintenance plan.

Magento is one of the most powerful and widely used eCommerce platforms available. While its rich feature set makes it incredibly versatile, it can also make troubleshooting more complex. Fortunately, many Magento-related issues have well-documented solutions, if you know where to look. (Hint: It’s in guides like this one.) Whether the challenges are routine or more advanced, you don’t always need to be an expert to resolve them. With the right guidance, even complex problems become manageable.

In this article, we’ll cover the top 6 Magento performance issues and how to fix them, including strategies for improving site speed.

At CertiPro, we’re experts in all things related to Magento. Contact us today if you’d like to learn more about how we can help you maintain your website.

Key Takeaways

Proven Strategies for Magento 2 Speed Optimization
Common Performance Bottlenecks in Magento Stores
Practical Solutions to Improve Magento 2 Performance
Speed Optimization Tips for Open-Source Magento Installations
Key Takeaways from Official Magento 2 Image Optimization Guidelines
Essential Magento Optimization Techniques to Boost Store Speed

What is a Magento Performance Issue?
What are the Top Magento Performance Issues?
Unoptimized Hosting Environment
Slow Load Times
Frequent Crashes or Timeouts
Security Vulnerabilities
Poor Mobile and Responsive Designs
Missing Scheduled Tasks
How We Can Help

What is a Magento Performance Issue?

A website performance issue is any problem that reduces site speed or harms website performance. These issues have a negative impact on user experience, reduce conversion rates, and lower search engine rankings. Fixing website performance issues is a crucial part of maintaining your Magento webstore.

What are the Top Magento Performance Issues?

Magento is a powerful eCommerce platform, but even well-maintained stores can experience recurring bugs and issues common to the content management system (CMS). Left unaddressed, these problems can disrupt business operations, frustrate customers, and harm your store’s overall performance. That’s why it’s essential to resolve Magento issues promptly.

Timely troubleshooting helps keep your store secure, efficient, and user-friendly. While some problems are minor and can be fixed with simple solutions, others may require more advanced Magento expertise to resolve.

1. Unoptimized Hosting Environment

A hosting environment consists of the servers, software, and infrastructure that supports your website. Popular Magento hosting platforms include Nexcess, MageMojo, and JetRails. It’s important to choose the right hosting environment for your webstore. A poorly configured or underpowered hosting environment can cause issues such as slow load times, increased downtime, poor scalability, and security vulnerabilities.

Magento is well-known for being flexible and highly customizable. The downside of this flexibility is that its code is often more complex than other popular eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify. It also has more demanding hosting requirements.

These are hosting requirements for a Magento 2 webstore:

A dedicated or cloud server with significant resources (RAM, CPU)
A compatible technology stack (PHP, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Composer, etc.)
Command-line access (SSH) for setup and deployment
Regular maintenance, like indexing and cache management
Potentially a Redis, Varnish, and CDN integration, depending on the needs of the business

How to Fix Magento Hosting Problems

The easiest way to fix any potential Magento hosting problems is to choose the right hosting provider. If you’re currently having problems or running into unexpected limitations with your Magento 2 webstore, you should check your hosting provider and make sure it has the capabilities necessary to host a robust Magento store. You should also regularly monitor and maintain your hosting environment to ensure that it continues to provide the best possible performance.

More specific problems like security vulnerabilities and slow page load times may require more specific fixes within your hosting environment. Many of these issues will be covered in the rest of the article.

2. Slow Load Times

Slow load times harm the user experience and lower conversion rates. According to studies, websites that take 3-5 seconds to load lose roughly 12% of website views with each additional second. It also harms SEO and search engine rankings, making it less likely that people will find and visit your website.

How to Fix Slow Loading Times Magento

Multiple issues can cause slow website load times. We recommend doing the following tasks to improve your website load times:

Compress images using tools like TinyPNG or ImageOptim. You may also want to upload lower quality images. While 300 dots per inch (dpi) is standard for print, the online standard is 72 dpi.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML to lower your file sizes. Magento includes built-in minification features or you can download third-party tools.
Optimize caching. Full Page Cache (FPC) can improve response times and reduce the load on your server.
Implement a new Magento theme. If you’re still experiencing issues with slow load times, a bloated or inefficient theme may be to blame. Themes with excessive HTTP requests, inefficient JavaScript executions, and that don’t have lazy loading may all lead to slow load times.

3. Frequent Crashes or Timeouts

Unoptimized database queries are the most common cause of website crashes and timeouts. Magento’s database performance is essential for managing complex product catalogs, customer data, and order processing. Maintaining a well-organized, up-to-date, and optimized database is critical for ensuring long-term efficiency and sustaining high query performance, particularly as your Magento website grows.

How to Optimize Database Magento

We recommend taking the following steps to optimize your Magento database:

Schedule routine database maintenance and clean-up, including removing unnecessary logs, orphaned data, and expired sessions.
Analyze query performance and ensure that all necessary indexes are properly configured
Consider partitioning tables to improve query efficiency for large catalogs
Cache database query results and reduce your database load using in-memory data stores like Redis or Memcached
Use Magento’s built-in cron jobs or custom scripts to remove old data from tables like log_visitor and report_event, which can grow to be quite large over time

4. Security Vulnerabilities

Consumers are more safety-conscious than ever. Every year, it seems like there are even more well-publicized hacks and data breaches, with even big companies like Equifax, Yahoo, Target, Home Depot, and Capital One reporting embarrassing security breaches. Having strong website security boosts consumer confidence since they can trust you with their sensitive data. It also helps protect you against lawsuits and other costly ramifications for mishandling customer data.

How to Boost Magento Website Security

We recommend taking the following steps to boost your Magento website security:

Regularly update your website theme and third-party extensions. This includes removing unnecessary extensions that you no longer need.
Quickly add new security patches to your website to protect against newly exposed website vulnerabilities.
Keep valid SSL certificates and use modern protocols like TLS 1.3 whenever possible.

Need help speeding up your Magento store? Contact our team for a free review.

5. Poor Mobile and Responsive Design

Consumers access websites on a variety of different devices from desktop monitors to smartphones. Responsive website design involves creating sites that automatically adjust to fit different screen sizes and devices.

According to research by StatCounter, more than 55% of worldwide web traffic comes from mobile devices. Websites that provide a poor experience on mobile can tarnish a brand’s reputation and send potential customers running to your competitors’ sites instead. Poor website responsiveness harms SEO, lowers your search engine rankings, and results in lower traffic and conversions.

How to Implement Mobile Responsiveness Magento

We recommend taking the following steps to improve your Magento website’s responsiveness:

Build your site using Responsive Website Design Principles. Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut here. If your site wasn’t built using Responsive Website Design Principles, you may have to rebuild it from the ground up. Creating a website according to these principles involves implementing flexible grid layouts that adapt to various screen sizes, using relative units instead of fixed pixels for width and spacing, and designing with a mobile-first approach that you then scale up for larger screens. This includes using a mobile-optimized theme or framework.

Implement Viewport Meta Tags. Viewport meta tags ensure that pages scale appropriately on different devices. Here is the correct bit of HTML code to add: <meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>

Optimize Images. To ensure that images are responsive and look good on every screen, we recommend using WebP. We also recommend compressing images to reduce load times on mobile and implementing the srcset attribute for multiple image resolutions.

Leverage CSS Media Queries. We recommend that you apply CSS media queries to style different elements based on screen width. That will ensure that your website elements always look good regardless of device.

Simplify Navigation. Use hamburger or collapsible menus for smaller screens and reduce menu depth to avoid frustrating mobile users.

Minimize Content and Features. Remove unnecessary popups or auto-playing media on mobile devices, which can be frustrating to users. We also recommend prioritizing key content and calls-to-action.

Improve Loading Speed. We recommend enabling lazy loading for images and videos, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files, and using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to serve assets quickly.

6. Missing Scheduled Tasks

Ideally, your website or ERP should have automated scheduled tasks to do functions such as order processing, invoice generation, sending shipping emails, or doing other time-based tasks. If these automated functions don’t occur, it can have a serious impact on your store’s functionality and performance. It can also cause caching and index failures, search index and catalog issues, and lead to the failure of third-party integrations.

If your website is missing scheduled tasks, it means that your cron jobs are failing to run properly. A cron job is a task scheduled to run at specific intervals or at a specific time using the cron utility. This tool automates repetitive tasks, reduces human error, and improves efficiency.

How to Fix Cron Job Issues Magento

If you’re having issues with your cron jobs, there are a few potential sources that could be causing your problems.

Incorrect Cron Job Configuration. You may have used the incorrect cron syntax, including typos or wrong timing expressions. Both of these issues can prevent crons from running. You should also check to make sure that Magento cron jobs are added to the system’s crontab. If they aren’t, scheduled tasks will not trigger.

Cron Daemon Not Running. Magento’s cron scripts won’t execute if the Linux cron service (crond) is stopped or disabled.

Permissions and Ownership Issues. We recommend checking your permissions and ownership settings. User owner mismatches, like when the cron runs under root but the Magento files are owned by www-data, can cause cron jobs to fail. Incorrect file or folder permissions can also block Magento from executing bin/magento cron:run.

PHP CLI Misconfiguration. If your system’s PHP CLI version is different from the webserver’s version or doesn’t have the required modules, cron scripts may fail to execute properly.

Long-Running or Stuck Cron Processes. Some cron jobs may take too long or get stuck in an infinite loop, which blocks other scheduled tasks from running on time.

Database Connection Errors. Cron jobs rely on Magento’s database. Any issues like connection timeouts, deadlocks, or server downtime will disrupt scheduled tasks.

Magento Cron Job Overload. If your website has too many scheduled tasks, it may overload the cron system, resulting in missed executions.

Broken or Failing Modules. Faulty third-party cron jobs can interfere with cron jobs. If an extension’s cron task crashes, it may stop the queue for all tasks.

Magento Performance Issues FAQs

What are the most common reasons Magento runs slowly?

Magento performance issues often stem from poor hosting environments, unoptimized code or themes, too many or poorly built extensions, large databases without indexing, disabled caching, and a lack of a content delivery network (CDN). Each of these can slow down page load times and impact the user experience. Better Magento cache management helps improve site speed.

How can I tell if my Magento store has performance issues?

Common signs include slow page load times, high bounce rates, slow admin panel performance, or complaints from users. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, New Relic, or built-in Magento profiler tools can help diagnose performance bottlenecks. Often, identifying the source of the issue can be harder than fixing the issue, which is where experienced Magento web developers come in. It’s important to work with experienced developers who have a deep understanding of Magento so you can maximize the benefit you get from your site.

Does using too many extensions hurt Magento performance?

If you’re looking for search terms like “Magento extension impact on speed,” you’ve come to the right place. While extensions can add valuable functionality, having too many or poorly coded extensions can increase load times, conflict with each other, or overload the server. Always audit your installed extensions and remove any that aren’t essential. It’s also important to remove extensions you are no longer using and to make sure that you’re updating extensions regularly.

How important is hosting when it comes to Magento speed?

Your hosting environment is critical to the performance and speed of your Magento website. Magento websites often have complex coding requirements that require significant hosting resources and support. Shared hosting environments and less flexible hosting environments often aren’t able to meet the needs of robust Magento websites, which can harm site performance. A dedicated or cloud VPS with optimized server configurations (e.g., NGINX, Redis, Varnish, PHP-FPM) can significantly boost performance.

Can Magento’s default caching handle high traffic, or should I use additional tools?

Magento’s built-in caching is good for smaller websites and those with lower traffic, but it may fall short when it comes to high-traffic websites or those with large product catalogs. These sites may benefit from using additional tools like Varnish for full-page caching and Redis or Memcached for backend caching. Using these types of tools for heavier sites can improve scalability and performance.

How do I optimize Magento’s database for better performance?

There are a number of different ways you can optimize Magento’s database. We recommend regularly cleaning logs, properly indexing, archiving or deleting old data, and regularly reviewing queries to make sure they’re efficient. For Magento 1 sites, we also recommend enabling flat catalog tables. Magento’s built-in indexing and optimization tools can help you streamline your site, as well as tools like MySQLTuner. Better Magento cache management can also help improve website speed.

Is Magento 2 faster than Magento 1?

Magento 2 is generally considered a better choice than Magento 1 thanks to its additional functionality and tools. Out of the box, it includes better architecture, built-in caching, support for modern technologies (like PHP 8.x), and full-page caching. However, the performance of your website still depends on proper configuration and optimization. A well-configured Magento 1 site may outperform a badly configured Magento 2 webstore.

Will switching to a CDN improve my Magento site speed?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) delivers static assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript from servers closer to the user’s location. This reduces load times and server strain. Using a CDN to deliver content on your Magento website can improve site speed. Developers often use CDNs such as Cloudflare, Fastly, and AWS CloudFront with Magento.

How often should I perform performance audits on my Magento store?

At a minimum, we recommend doing quarterly performance audits. However, to ensure the best website performance, it’s best to do some performance audits more frequently, such as installing updates and security patches. Regular performance audits help you catch issues early, improving overall website performance.

What are the best tools to monitor Magento performance?

As always, the best tools for monitoring Magento performance are those that are best suited to your company’s needs. The “best” solution for one company may be the worst solution for another if it doesn’t offer the necessary functionality. In additional to Magento’s built-in tools, other popular tools for monitoring website performance include:

New Relic – for deep performance profiling
GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights – for front-end load testing
Magento Profiler – a built-in developer tool
Blackfire.io – for performance profiling of PHP applications
Elasticsearch monitoring tools – if you’re using Elasticsearch for search

Using these tools will help you and your developers achieve Magento 2 performance optimization.

What are Magento cron job issues?

Magento cron jobs are essential for automating tasks such as reindexing, generating sitemaps, sending emails, and cleaning logs. When cron jobs don’t run correctly, they can lead to a variety of issues that affect both performance and functionality.

Common Magento cron job issues include:

Cron Jobs Not Running
Cron Jobs Running Incorrectly
Cron Jobs Being Stuck in Pending Status
Duplicate or Overlapping Cron Jobs
Timezone or Scheduling Mismatch Issues
Log Bloat and Cleanup Failures

What are Magento slow loading fixes?

A number of issues can cause a website to load slowly. These steps should help you improve your website speed:

Enable Production Mode
Enable and Configure Full Page Caching
Optimize Caching Configuration
Use Redis of Memcached for Cache and Session Storage
Optimize MySQL/MariaDB
Minify and Merge JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
Use a CDN
Optimize Images
Database Cleanup and Optimization
Disable Unused Modules

How We Can Help

Some companies choose to handle Magento maintenance issues on their own while others hire third-party companies that provide Magento maintenance services. The approach that works best for you is the one that best fits your company’s needs. Regardless of who you go with, your plan should include steps to identify and correct the errors we’ve identified in this guide.

At CertiPro, we’re experts in all things related to Magento. We build, maintain, and customize top-quality Magento websites for our clients. We also create Sage Magento integrations, which allow companies to link their backend business management software with their front-end storefront. CertiPro is your one-stop shop for any kind of Magento project or service. We offer a variety of customizable Magento maintenance plans to fit the needs of any size business, ranging from a small family store to a multinational organization.

Need help with a tricky Magento issue?

Don’t let performance problems slow your store down. Contact our Magento experts today for fast, reliable troubleshooting and long-term solutions for Magento 2 performance optimization.