Slow Magento Checkout can ruin your e-commerce business. Nobody likes to wait in line. I will show you 5 ways to speed up magento checkout / add to cart that could also improve conversion rates. 1. Disable shipping methods you don't use By default magento enables Fedex, USPS, UPS, DHL shipping methods. They all send requests to external gateways to collect shipping rates = performance hog. To give you an idea of how much it slows down checkout let us add profiler marks to app/code/core/Mage/Shipping/Model/Shipping.php collectRates call: public function collectRates( Mage_Shipping_Model_Rate_Request $request ) {...