How to speed up Magento search using Amasty extensions

Hello to Amasty blog readers!

We have been posting quite a number of articles on Magento 1 and 2 speed and performance. Today we’re showing some info on speeding up Magento search – an important part of overall site speed improvement, which is often neglected by merchants. In this test, we wanted to highlight how two Amasty extensions combined show significant difference when it comes to search speed.

People who use site search are more likely to purchase. Faster search is a faster path to a conversion. Conversion rates through site search can be up to 50% higher than the average.

Out of the box Magento search functionality is implemented with the help of MySQL (Full Text Search). For Magento Enterprise, there’s a possibility to turn on Apache Solr search.

Amasty does have its own solution for Magento search – an Advanced Search extension. We often advise our customers to use it in combination with Amasty Full Page Cache, as the latter can cache search results, giving a significant rise in the repeated search results speed.

How Amasty Search Pro and Full Page Cache work together

To show you the difference, we did some tests, and here are the results.

For the test, we configured three hosts:

example.com — catalog search via MySQL Full Text Search
example.com — catalog search via Apache Solr 3.4.0
example.com — catalog search via Search Pro with Full Page Cache

We’re performing this experiment to test the search suggestion speed when entering the query into the search field, and the returning of the search results page. For measuring the speed of these parameters, we are using Siege. All the tests were performed for 1 minute, and we measured the number of transactions per second, as well as the min, max and average query execution time.

Magento search speed test results

Takeaway

The results of the test clearly show that the search performance with Amasty Serch Pro and FPC pairing is dramatically better than Magento out of the MySQL FTS box search and even Apache Solr variant.

Of course, these are not the only options when it comes to search on Magento, take the Sphinx engine, for example.

Amasty FPC + Search Pro combination gives a significant speed boost and a good result with minimum of efforts, and it’s a perfect solution for small and small-to-middle Magento websites considering available features, speed result and efforts needed for implementing the site search.