Blazing fast Magento 2... How I did it!

[cmoi40]

I started with a VPS with 4G of RAM then 8G of Ram  with 3 cpu but magento was super slowwwwww. So I decided I needed a change.

Hardware: I decided to host my own server so I bough a used server with 256 G of RAM, 28 core CPU and 1T hard drive. My connection speed is about 1000Mb/sec (symetrical upload/download).

I installed Ubuntu 20.04 with sshd, Nginx and Varnish as a cache system. Also installed php 7.4 and MySQ and java as well as Elasticsearch. Each component is installed properly and each is finely tuned.

I am guessing that this is the optimal setup! Pinging my local IP is about 64 ms which I will probably tune up soon.

Now.. what changes my loading time is truly the theme! I did not find a theme I liked that did a good job at loading fast. All the decent themes are bloated with tons of useless javascript and Css. Unoptimized for mobile and truly buggy.

I am yet to find the fastest (and decent) theme out there. If I can't find it, I guess I will need to create it by myself.

Anyone knows a theme that can load fast??

[Robert Rand]

I've seen very good results with Hyva.io.

It was built by a developer that, like you, didn't like the options on the market, and wanted to take a modern/clean approach. It's built with TailwindCSS and Alpine JS, and scores very high with Core Web Vitals (you can test a demo at demo.hyva.io).

It also has a very active community. The Hyva Slack group, as of this moment, appears to have over 1,700 members. It's definitely been gaining a lot of popularity.

Best of luck!

[cmoi40]

Thanks. They score very high in page speed indeed (99%). Their design is very simplistic though.

Will check it out

[Robert Rand]

My pleasure!

[ibtisamdev8aef]

I've heard alot about Argento theme. Also, saw somewhere a theme named fastest theme, as the name suggests maybe it is one of the fastest, but who know until one tries. Anyways, from my experience, custom theme is the go to option. And as for the performance, litespeed server along with a managed Magento hosting does very well for me.

[aMiSTACX]

The fastest sites [experience from our Dev projects] still use native LUMA [blank], and then extend it, and we have no conflict issues with various Magento components.

We have some very large and heavy hitting sites running on as little as 2procs and 8GB  w/o Elastic, boosted FPC, and AWS RDS database as little as a t3-med; end-to-end caching providing reduced costs, high stability, and amazing performance.

If you stay away from marketing hype, and do self A/B tests, the choice becomes clearer. 

Good Luck!  

[rimshadevr27ac]

Spoiler

It's great to hear that you've made significant hardware and software improvements to your Magento 2 setup. Having a powerful server with optimized components is definitely crucial for better performance. However, as you've rightly identified, the theme can also play a significant role in the loading time and overall performance of your Magento store.

Check Magento Marketplace for fast and optimized themes with good reviews.
Consider custom development for a tailored and optimized theme.
Choose themes built on lightweight front-end frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation.
Ensure the theme is fully responsive and mobile-optimized.
Use browser caching and a CDN for faster asset delivery.
Test theme performance with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
Regularly optimize your entire Magento installation for better performance.