Open discussion on speeding up osCommerce

[♥mattjt83]

Another thing to consider is the speed of the server itself. I have seen sites that scored much lower with pagespeed and yslow than my personal site and still loaded much faster than mine. That being said, I agree with @@toyicebear that every little speed tweak you can do will help your site in the long run and improve your users experience.

[burt]

Think back 2 or 3 or 10 years. At those points in time was "speed of browsing" an important factor ? We were on dial-up connections, then 1mb broadband, and so on. Shops worked, even in those stone age days.

 

At some point common sense says "stop the tweaks and concentrate on your customer service, seo and all the other good stuff".

 

It's time to get a modicum of reality - will the average internet user be put off by a 200 millisecond delay? Or will the average customer get put off by a crappy design, or a broken page or whatever.

 

With 50Mb broadband now common, along with SSD hosting etc etc it's time to do the tweaks we can, and move onto more important things that -really- impact your bottom line, instead of some 200ms improvement that could ~theoretically~ improve it.

 

In short: let's do what we can in the realms of how each shopowners individual business dictates; if you sell jam to a few of your local neighbours it's different from selling 10000 products every day. Tailor your needs appropriately, and don't get bogged down by the small stuff.

[♥mattjt83]

@@burt I thought this was an open discussion on speeding up osCommerce :)

 

I don't think you can just say that internet connection speeds are getting faster and servers are getting faster so lets not worry about optimizing our sites performance. Many people are accessing sites on mobile devices over slow 3G connections, spotty wifi, or in my case absolutely terrible DSL connections. Site speed can really affect users and be a huge turn off.

 

There are so many facets to a successful website and they are all equally important, including site load times. I would suggest that people get the UI, functionality, and SEO work of their sites the way they need to be and then start really working on load speed especially because it can also help with SEO.

 

Another thing that I find interesting is that with all this social sharing going on people haven't optimized their sites for mobile devices. I would say most users check their facebook, twitter, google+ accounts from their mobile device so what is the point of sharing things on those networks if your site is unusable / difficult to use on mobile devices?

[burt]

Read again, especially the last paragraph ;)

 

Or put another way: "each shopowner should do what they can within the realms of their own capability and or cost/benefit ratio". Eg; little point setting up CDN along with a SSL just to service 20 sales per annum. If the same shopowner serviced 2000 sales per annum, possibly worth doing.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for doing whatever is possible, based upon the need of the shop in question. Site owners and developers need to weigh up the cost of doing XYZ compared to the benefit of doing XYZ. That is a bottom line reality.

[♥bruyndoncx]

oh, I'm usually on a big broadband pipe from home, but as it happens, I'm now on 2G data.

I'm glad that my oscommerce orders page shows much faster than google and facebook. This forum is not too bad either.

 

as for cost/benefit, I think it is also a question of scalability, if you have slow running queries, a few more users or spiders as usual, and max 10 database connections, you soon get 'unable to connect to database" issues.

If you are on a shared server, the response times can really fluctuate, and the less database trips required the better/

[Mort-lemur]

But what is a good acceptable page load time? 5 seconds? 1 second? 1/2 second?

[♥bruyndoncx]

It used to be 7 seconds, but nowadays people are used to faster websites, I think 'acceptable' is closer to 4 or 5 seconds now.

Less than 2 sec to me is really fast.

[Bob Terveuren]

Hi

 

http://cba.unl.edu/research/articles/548/download.pdf has some interesting stuff (it was written in 2004 though)

[jhande]

But what is a good acceptable page load time? 5 seconds? 1 second? 1/2 second?

 

Hey Heather,

 

You can actually answer that question yourself. How long are you willing to wait for a site to load, especially one that sells products that you are shopping for?

 

Personally... I will wait even longer than 5 seconds. It has only been a few months that high speed internet (48Mbps) has been available to me. Sure fast page load times are important and nice, but I have never stumbled across an osC site that was too slow do to the standard files. I have seen some that were ridiculously slow do to non-optimized images and slow servers.

 

I think as was mentioned, not so important to squeeze every little nano second out of the site. Speed it up and work on other aspects of the site.

 

Just my 2 cents.

 

;)

[Mort-lemur]

@@jhande Thanks Jim, Im happy with my site load speed - just wondered if there was some magic must-beat speed that I had to achieve - but apparently not - it all seems very subjective..........

[jhande]

@@jhande Thanks Jim, Im happy with my site load speed

No problem Heather, and that's the important thing... you are happy. :thumbsup:

 

just wondered if there was some magic must-beat speed that I had to achieve - but apparently not - it all seems very subjective..........

Exactly! As long as it loads with a respectful speed so it doesn't discourage customers away, you have succeeded.

[Mort-lemur]

I See that the mod Chemo-Compress has come up in the contributions section again http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/8928 what are the views on this mod - apart from the fact that the preg_replace function causes errors?

Thanks

[♥kymation]

@@Mort-lemur That's really old code that would need to be updated to work with the current version of osCommerce. Most hosts offer an installation that includes compression built-in, so it's probably not going to help anyway. However, that preg_replace() could be fixed easily enough if you want to try it.

 

Regards

Jim

[Mort-lemur]

@@kymation

 

Thanks Jim, I have server side compression turned on, but was wondering if this compressed something not covered by the server compression.

[♥kymation]

You can only compress files once. If your server's compression isn't working, or you don't have that option, then this code might be a good alternative.

 

Regards

Jim

[♥bruyndoncx]

with respect to how fast is fast enough ...

An interesting read on how slow (mobile) sites will affect google SEO positioning

2014: the mobile SEO timebomb

 

http://econsultancy.com/blog/63962-2014-the-mobile-seo-timebomb

[Mort-lemur]

@@bruyndoncx Interesting read, yet when you analyise their own website - it performs rather poorly as can be seen below:

[♥bruyndoncx]

@@Mort-lemur

to me the takeaway is that for google seo competitive ranking, you have to be ahead of the curve if you are in a competitive market.

the focus of this article is mobile, which I think is the general focus for optimization (mobile phone and tablets) for the short/medium term future. Desktops have enough screen and bandwidh to not having too worry too much about optimization for the users.

 

econsultancy to me is a brand that stands out enough not having to worry too much especially for (mobile) seo.

I think they have probably quite a high percentage of direct trafic, twitter and/or facebook referrals.

[♥toyicebear]

To get a test of your website as google sees it both as Mobile and pc go to: http://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

[♥mattjt83]

I have done quite a bit of work on optimizing my site for load speed. This has included server changes (APC and mod_pagespeed to name just a couple) and lots of other things with the sites code base.

 

My latest adventure is using maxcdn to serve static files. It is a VERY easy setup to use their service. What is interesting now is that my pagespeed and yslow scores are better while using maxcdn, my actual load times are a bit slower ( take what you want from that :) ).

 

Lately I have been playing with adding in non-essential page elements via javascript after the page has loaded and heavy use of head.js (headjs.com). This could be for reviews, also purchased, related items, etc....

[Mort-lemur]

@@mattjt83 Could you share a pageview of what this site achieves by way of a GTmetrix screenshot - obviously with the url omitted.

 

Thanks

[♥mattjt83]

Interesting to note that I had a better score on my images until switching to the cdn.

[Mort-lemur]

@@mattjt83 Wow!

[dr_lucas]

This -> http://www.phpfastcache.com/

[Mort-lemur]

That looks interesting - anyone tried it yet ??