In this post Oleg Yemchuk from Maven Ecommerce explains what Varnish is and what the benefits are when using it underneath a Magento store.
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What is Varnish?
You may wonder what Varnish is. Well, if you are looking for the incredibly fast cache technology (or reverse caching proxy), you’re on the right way.
It works by the principle that a user reaches the Varnish server just before the request is redirected to the web server (if no cache version is available). It will take only a few milliseconds for the page to be delivered from the Varnish cache storage in case a cached version of the request is available. Response time depends on the hardware, but because loading a prepared response from memory is so much faster than having the web server process everything on disk, using Varnish is a magnitude faster than Magento’s cache mechanisms alone.
In other words, Varnish is an HTTP booster. There are several ways you can use this technology: as failover system, caching reversal proxy, or load balancer. All of these manners will result in amazingly increased Magento site performance.
This technology’s configuration language is known as VCL. It will be converted and compiled into C-code. All cache content will be immediately provided out of the service memory. You might think of applying Magento Varnish if your websites have some problems with obtaining traffic or is essentially cumbersome.
Top Benefits
Caching is a frequently applied practice that helps to store data ready for retrieval without the need to run all processes again to shape this data. To make all this data available at any time, it is important to store them in memory or on a disk with fast reading speeds. It excludes the need to download them again and thus saves a plenty of time and nerves.
Your browser’s cache will cache assets like images and JavaScript when you use appropriate caching tools. Varnish brings the caching of your site to a new level. Every time a visitor comes to your website, a range of requests is sent to the server to load the page. The server starts looking for the files that correspond to the requests. It demands executing any server-side, request-related code and then sending the fully rendered web page back to the client.
Having Varnish means having a helping hand which will watch for duplicate requests already received before. After the first visit to a page, Varnish will create an exact copy of what is returned to the user. In other words, the next time any user attends the same page, this proxy will recognize the earlier request so that it will reply faster with a cached version of the result.
With the help of this simple method, any online business owner can increase the speed of his website 300-1000 times! Varnish is not a specific piece of technology to be used with Magento, but due to the vast amount of performance issues of Magento out-of-the-box, it fits extremely well.
In addition, whenever the site is hit by heavy amounts of traffic, it is equipped enough to cope with it. It works in a way that the time needed to return a cached result takes less processing power than accomplishing requests from the beginning. Do you wonder how these improvements reflect your sales and conversion rates? Find the answers below.
Conversion Goes Up
Along with Magento Varnish, you can notice a significant jump in your conversion. The conversion potential depends on the page load speed directly. By going up, this feature contributes to the overall profitability of your website. There is a range of successful examples. For instance, in case of Walmart, they decreased page load time by 1 second and this resulted in up to 2% increase in conversions. As for Amazon, every 0.1 second increase in load time decreases sales by 1%. Though these businesses might operate on a different playing field, you should be able to spot the difference page load speed makes.
SEO Value Grows
According to the world’s top search engine, page loading time can have positive or adverse effect on your store’s ranking. As one of Google’s primary purposes is to display only those sites that provide the best user experience at the top, you risk failing in case your website operates slowly. Even if you offer the best products for fair prices, if your competitor’s webshop loads faster, it will probably negatively influence your ranking for your desired keywords.
Improved User Experience
Pretend you move to the website and watch the loading icon rotating for a while. Most probably, you will go back to the search engine to pick another similar site that loads faster. Keep in mind that a reduced page load period will potentially lower bounce rate from your page.
One Time Installation
A lot of applications or Magento extensions require regular up-dates with respect to the fast progress in e-commerce. But it’s different for Varnish. Once installed, this cache technology will – theoretically – last for the entire life of your website.
You don’t have to conduct any extra work to set-up this proxy thanks to some specialized Magento extensions. It modifies Varnish configuration to fit Magento. Magento’s behaviors are changed as well in order to stimulate caching rates.
To sum up, prompt page loading provides any online business with four advantages:
- The increase of conversion rates.
- Reduced rate of abandoned carts at your website
- Minimized time for viewers to wait for your content display.
- Improved SEO value.
Together with Full Page Caching, Varnish becomes the best solution for full site optimization and page load speed. Once you have installed this caching technology, Varnish will take the load off of your web server instantly. All the advantages that it boasts will be noticed if your site generates high traffic. Magento sites take the best out of Varnish as they use a big number of web server resources when generating pages. By choosing Varnish and setting it up correctly, you will see significant speed improvements very soon.
