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osCommerce

The e-commerce.

How good is stock OsCommerce?


JcMagpie

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I thought it would be good to bench mark the stock install to give a better indication of what improvements need to be made on a new install. I used 2.3.4.1 Frozen stock install.

Google recommends a few tools one of which is built into the chrome browser.

Chrome DevTools is a set of web developer tools built directly into the Google Chrome browser. DevTools can help you diagnose problems quickly, which ultimately helps you build better websites, faster.

Optimizing website speed. The Audits panel provides quantitative reports of your site speed, as well as concrete tips on how to improve it.

Simply open chrome and go to the website you want to audit. Click on the 3 dots in top corner and select more tools, from the pop up window select developer tools.

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Now simply press the audit button and run audit.

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It will take a little time to run, and then you can review your results.

As you can see stock performance is good but mixed. You still need to do quite a lot of work to get your site optimized and performing well. So even when you think you have done it all its worth checking to see if anything can still be improved.

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I thought it would be interesting to see what alternatives are offered by my host to OsCommerce. The results were interesting! Clearly plenty of options for store owners to chose from. All these available from Cpanel to install for free.

As you can see OsCommerce is still considered a very good option.

When I get a bit more time It will be interesting to install the official stock OsCommerce and see how that compares to stock Frozen. Oh and yes te list has a few none cart apps. but most are full carts.

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Take all these ranking numbers with a grain of salt. Some of the tests may be very contrived and not reflect real world usage patterns. Use them as a starting point, but don't take them as gospel. If Google and other search engines are doing similar measurements as part of their ranking algorithm, I would take those more seriously. Finally, it's the real customer experience that counts the most.

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4 minutes ago, MrPhil said:

Some of the tests may be very contrived and not reflect real world usage patterns

And your evidence for this? These are tests carried out by me on my server with my installs. Please don't make comments you can not substantiate it helps no one.

 

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1 hour ago, JcMagpie said:

Well that was intresting. Looks like Official OcS out preforms Frozen in some areas! But clearly need improvment in others.

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It's only Performance and Accessibility that appear to be better between the official and frozen versions. I suspect that's because of the bootstrap files. You will see opencart which is also bootstrap based, also has a poor performance score. As a test you can try linking the bootstrap css to a CDN instead of locally, i suspect that will make a performance improvement.

 

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59 minutes ago, JcMagpie said:

And your evidence for this? These are tests carried out by me on my server with my installs. Please don't make comments you can not substantiate it helps no one.

I'm not attacking you. Do these canned tests document exactly what they are testing, and what they base their results on, and most importantly, give concrete steps to take to improve matters? Automated testing and evaluation is an area fraught with peril -- two pages with similar results may in real life offer very different user experiences, and vice-versa. A page load speed is pretty concrete (if done repeatedly and averaged out), while "accessibility" and "best practices" can be rather nebulous.

Get down off your high horse and contribute something useful, or I'll put you back on my Ignored Users list.

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28 minutes ago, MrPhil said:

 

Get down off your high horse and contribute something useful, or I'll put you back on my Ignored Users list.

Oh please I hope this time you keep it permanent.

 

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37 minutes ago, Hotclutch said:

As a test you can try linking the bootstrap css to a CDN instead of locally, i suspect that will make a performance improvement.

Oh ok worth trying.

 

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Ok so updated template_top so it uses this

<!-- Latest compiled and minified CSS -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-BVYiiSIFeK1dGmJRAkycuHAHRg32OmUcww7on3RYdg4Va+PmSTsz/K68vbdEjh4u" crossorigin="anonymous">

<!-- Optional theme -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/css/bootstrap-theme.min.css" integrity="sha384-rHyoN1iRsVXV4nD0JutlnGaslCJuC7uwjduW9SVrLvRYooPp2bWYgmgJQIXwl/Sp" crossorigin="anonymous">

<!-- Latest compiled and minified JavaScript -->
<script src="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.3.7/js/bootstrap.min.js" integrity="sha384-Tc5IQib027qvyjSMfHjOMaLkfuWVxZxUPnCJA7l2mCWNIpG9mGCD8wGNIcPD7Txa" crossorigin="anonymous"></script>

Only got a small change.

Also anyone wanting to see the detail behind the top level numbers can simply go to the link provided and look at the Google https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/speed/get-started

Its all explained and nothing is hidden. I think Google may know a thing or two about web optimization, Plus no harm in taking a look to see if we can make any improvments.

 

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So this is Frozen with a small change. Running again with Font Awesome disabled has given a good improvement. So clearly this Google tool is worth using to check changes to your website.

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All of these tools do not take into account certain things;

Examples:

  1. 2g/3g customers
    Why worry about these people? There is zero point in catering to 2g and 3g based customers in the arse-end of nowhere if you do not ship there.  
    In addition these people know they are on a poor connection, so expect sites to be slow.
    I cannot imagine a shopowner in (say) New York changing his site because someone in (say) Ulaan Bator can't get a good signal.
     
  2. Same site, different host
    A site tested on one honst will outperform or underperform compared to the EXACT SAME site on another host.
    Even on same hosts yet different server...same applies
     

However, as I previously stated on the "Frozen 2 BS4" thread, these sites do give an indication of what a shopowner could do.  But that *must* be on a shopowner by shopowner basis, dependent on each shopowners target audience. 

Don't make the mistake of relying on these reports...use them for basic info only, and don't take the results of someone else site as gospel that your site should be changed.  Put simply, each shopowner must decide for themself...how much money and/or time to throw at some perceived problem - and if that spending will pay dividend.   Bottom line trumps everything.

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:biggrin:Ulaanbaatar as its actualy known is is the capital and largest city of Mongolia and actualy has good broadband connections. A couple of my export customers hail from this wondefull city.

 

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2 minutes ago, JcMagpie said:

:biggrin:Ulaanbaatar as its actualy known is is the capital and largest city of Mongolia and actualy has good broadband connections. A couple of my export customers hail from this wondefull city.

Deleted, my comment really doesn't add anything to the conversation about website speed.  Ho hum.

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Not a problem Phil, you or any moderator or team member are welcome to delete

this or any other thread of mine you feel does not meet your high standards.

I understand and will not be offended.

 

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So should we care about people on slow broadband or 2/3g mobile connections?

Well that's a question each businesses has to determine it self.

So lets see what would happen if I decided I would only cater-for people on 4g in the UK!

This is the current UK 4g coverage. As you can see it not 100%, yes its centered around high population areas but still parts of the UK are poorly covered.

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So what about 2/3g. Well as you can see it has  coverage for areas with poor 4g. A lot overlaps with 4g so if you drop 4g it will default to 3g. This shows that at this point in time 2/3g coverage is still relevant and you should consider what your website experience will be like on a 3g connection especially if your aiming for mobile friendly website.

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It’s not that different for broadband just because and area has high speed it does not mean everyone is connected to it. Many people opt for the basic low cost package so it still pays to optimize even if your not aiming at the mobile customers.

As a business its tough out there and getting customers is about as hard as its ever been. You want to make your website as accessible as possible to as many customers as you can. If done right and planed from the start it need not cost anymore to achieve this.

 

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Each Site Owner needs to make the decision as to how far they want to take things. 
What is the potential ROI for spending days or weeks or 100s/100s on fine tuning? 
The answer for one may be "not worth the bother", the answer for another maybe totally opposite to that.  

This tool gives an indication of speed and is useful to test broadly similar pages against each other in an easy to read format;

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The official version outputs:

<html dir="ltr" lang="en">

whereas the community version outputs:

<html >

The accessibility tool also complains about the search form in cm_header_search.php

By placing a label on the input, fixing the HTML tag, and adding aria-hidden="true" to icons where they are simply being used for decoration purposes, takes the accessibility score up to 89% on the homepage at least.

 

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I also found the 14px minimum setting for text was being flagged by Google and 16px being recommended for mobile views? But this looks to be a recent recommendation.

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Also , I need to look into this a bit more as this is stock install? may be nothing.

https://snyk.io/vuln/npm:[email protected]

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Next when I have time ( after the footy) will take a look at what effect some of the more popular addons have on performance.

 

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