X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Pre-order Now and save 25% - Good until March 8th at 11PM EST

http://www.bcsengineering.com/store/images/T/xcart_speed_booster.png

The most exciting new module out there! Speed up your site and optimize for SEO all in the same module! Also works with CDSEO!

Our newest module X-cart Speed Booster will boost your X-cart speed! It creates a caching utility to cache your pages for quick HTML speed websites! Complete with 'hole-punching' utilities to still keep dynamic content (like the mini-cart) into your cached website, as well as instructions on how to create your own hole-punched dynamic content!

As an added bonus, the X-cart Speed Booster module also can create SEO friendly URL's or use CDSEO's URL's!

Expected release date is March 29th.

We currently have a site running this same technology with over 540,000 products! Their home page load time with this module is between 0.5 - 0.9 seconds! Without this module, their home page load time is about 20-40+ seconds!

Tests with sites that have only 180 products have speeds that are 3 times faster with this module!

Get ahead of your competition by boosting your speed and make the search engines even happier with a much quicker site!

This module has tiered pricing based upon the number of links on your site (categories, products, manufacturers, static pages). Purchase only what you need and easily upgrade to more pages later if needed. Most eCommerce sites can run on the default 500 pages or the next tier up of 5,000 pages. Select the number of Site Pages appropriate for your website! If you happen to go over your page limit, the mod will still work, it just won't cache the additional pages.

Includes a cron script you can set up to create the cache automatically nightly.

EASY INSTALL Only edit .htaccess and an sql patch so this module won't effect future X-Cart upgrades!

Contact Us If you don't see your X-cart version listed and you want it for your version!

NOTE: Requires apache mod_rewrite. As always, a properly sized web server is needed for optimal results. These speed improvements are purely from the mod without additional tweaks to the web server or X-cart.



See screenshots on our product page. Demo coming soon!

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

my my this does sound good. :D

Can you create a large demo store to show just how fast this is? ;)

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Yes we'll try to have a few kinds of demo stores soon. :) Just waiting on the latest CDSEO from Jon so we can fully test that feature and should be releasing by March 8th. It's pretty much done, just some final testing.

We'll try to have a demo next week. I'm not sure if our client that has over 540,000 products would want to be advertised on our product page. He might though. I'll ask. That would be a good way to see just how fast it is. :)

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Carrie,

How will this mod work with a CDN?
If the CDN is handing images and cached css and cached js, what is the mod going to do with the CDN edge servers?
Is it either/or?

Thx
J

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

How does the mod handle inventory levels (including for variants)? If a variant reaches a 0 stock level, does the cached product page get updated immediately, or does it wait until the cron runs?

Thanks

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Hi Jeremy,

Well it curl's X-cart to get the data for the cache. So the CDN would be just used for dynamic pages and for when it's creating the cache.

Does that answer your question?

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Hi,

It would update on next cron, or the nice thing about it, is you can create a 'hole-punch' for the inventory so that part is dynamic. So if you have a part of your website that is important to be dynamic, you can still have it be yet still benefit from the speed of the rest being 'static' or a 'snapshot'.

We may expand to triggers for specific pieces to be refreshed. We do that for this 540,000+ product site. We can specifically request certain pieces to refresh. But I think that will be a future feature unless there is great demand for it and we can fit it in before the release date.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Thanks, Carie. It may be a feature request only for the kinds of shops that have limited inventory, and they want the pages updated immediately when the items go out of stock. (With the minicart being dynamic, it might not matter too much if the product page itself does not have on-demand inventory updates.)

The mod looks interesting - thanks!

---

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

We float between 1000 and 2000 unique products where the inventory is always a maximum of 1 and when it's sold it's gone. If the inventory is "hole-punched" will the product pages still be cached or will they have to be dynamic?

Will Jon's xCMS pages be cached or will they be dynamic?

How does this work with X-Cart's Mobile Mod?

We really want this mod and the $375 sale price is not a problem but if all our product pages and xCMS pages are still dynamic I'm not sure we would benefit.

Help Please :-)

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

How this mod differs from the old (still included in XC) html catalog? The html catalog generates static html pages which have to be re-generated on every change. This mod uses cached pages, again static, which have to be re-generated again when there is a change... or to refresh contents, quantity, etc.

With the html catalog the whole site is static html site and when customer gets to cart it turns dynamic.

Does this mod works the same way or only some parts are static? Seems to me it does work the same way or very similar.

Or am I understanding how the mod works wrong?

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

We could have optional triggers to refresh a product's page (to capture inventory) when an order goes through. Email us the idea and I'll run it by and see if it's easy to put in.

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

It's probably best if you email us this and I can double check. I think you could hole-punch just the inventory part, but I can't say for sure without checking. See my above reply too that we might be able to trigger that specific page refresh upon purchase of a product. Email us if you like this feature and we can add it in.

We hadn't considered caching Jon's xCMS pages but I don't see why we couldn't. Email us that too and we can look to put that in as a feature, if not in this release in the next.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

I'd say it's quite different in that you can have dynamic pieces in the cache. This makes it much more flexible to work with your needs by combining static and dynamic pieces. It's methods in creating these cache pages is totally different from the HTML catalog. You do not use the files directly like you do with the HTML catalog.

It's also different in that you can use things like CDSEO or it's own SEO friendly URL's without using the HTML catalog way which isn't ideal. You can even set the URL's for even more ideal SEO.

It's more like how the big eCommerce websites do things. You could even extend this into load balancing if you wanted to.

It's pretty slick too in that there is just an edit to your .htaccess and an SQL patch. That's it. No X-cart code edits. :) Some optional features my have code edits (that we are talking about above) but the main program has none.

Does that help?

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

I'm not sure how your reply relates to Steve's. We have the keywords in there because it's standard to have them available to edit in X-cart. We would have gotten more questions to not have them in there than to have them. Many are not aware that keywords aren't used much and are convinced they have to populate them still anyway. Might as well have it all centralized then.

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

One exciting feature I didn't know that will be supported is Multiple Languages! So the multi-language drop down will work and it will cache the different language versions. The same URL will be used for the different languages like the default X-cart does.

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Demo's coming soon! Many have taken advantage of the 25% off sale so far!

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Sale extended till March 15! We're working on polishing up a few more features and getting the demo's up before the sale ends. So we've extended it until March 15th!

http://www.bcsengineering.com/store/onsale.php?onsaleid=138&MMCF_xfBooster

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

We've had some technical issues with our demo server having some operating system type issues. File accesses would randomly take around 3-5 seconds even directly in ssh.

We've been working on a solution and will have the demo sites ready soon. They are all installed and ready to go, just waiting on the operating system to stop being glitchy so that the demo is useful!

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Our demo server issues is your gain! I've extended the sale until Friday March 22, at 11pm EST!

We've found some raid issues with our demo server and hope to have them fixed early next week. As a result, we've extended the pre-sale until next Friday, March 22 at 11pm EST!

I'll update this thread when it's ready to demo!

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

We have the demo site's hard drives fixed! I will have it up soon (been home all week with a sick kid so I'm a bit behind). We should have the Speed Booster mod ready early next week. We're adding a few more features before the release. Preorder sale is extended until March 29! Get it while it's 25% off!


Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Any updates on the Demo site?

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Yes actually I was working on getting this finished up yesterday. I have an FAQ ready and 2 demos. One with the standard X-cart products and another one with over 100,000 products.

Let us know what questions you have!

http://www.bcsengineering.com/blog/x_cart_speed_booster_mod_faq

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Carrie,

I am ready to pull the trigger on the preorder, however I am a little worried about its functionality with my site. How does this module manage to cache "responsive" templates? (i.e Phil's Adapt, or any of the other offerings out there)

Along these lines, our prices and inventory are constantly changing. How much "slow down" can be expected from "hole punching" those aspects of the site?

Thank you!

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Hey.

Thanks for the questions. I added them to our FAQ.

For responsive templates, yes a Responsive template will still operate normally. Think of it this way, X-cart gives you an HTML page in the end after it does all it▓s processing and calculations. What this module does is store that HTML page for quick retrieval. No processing involved (or minimal if you holepunch). So the HTML result is the same, it▓s just a snapshot and all the processing is done when you run the cache to generate these snap shot pages.


For the holepunching, it takes about 150 milliseconds to initialize X-cart. So you would add that much time plus what ever query you need. If it▓s something like asking for the current inventory amount for a product, that time is pretty negligible as it▓s a simple query to the database. So to holepunch the inventory would only add around 150 milliseconds.

Let me know though if this isn't helpful!

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Carrie:

Can you show just what is required to holepunch? Are these template edits?

Kermit

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Hi Kermit,

They are small template edits for the mini cart and we already provide the php file for it. For something not built in like the mini cart, you need to do a template edit and create a php file per the example we give.

Drop us an email and I can email you the install file so you can see an example. I'd rather not post it here because I wouldn't want someone in the future use it and it be out of date.

It is a more advanced feature of the module and we'd be happy to help provide any custom hole punching services if needed. For someone that knows X-cart it's not hard to use. So it just depends on your knowledge there.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Last day for 25% off!! Our plan is to roll out the software later today to those that have already preordered!

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Exciting News! We now have a handler in the module that will auto regenerate the cache for specific pages. You don't even have to run the cron if you do this optional steps!

This is Great for those concerned about pricing changes, inventory changes, etc. You just put an update handler into the product modify and into the checkout calls and it will update the product and any categories it's in on the fly!

This handler will accept productid's, categoryids, manufacturerids and static page ids!

We will have this feature in the first release!

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Will this mod still allow the use of Altered Carts One Page Checkout mod?

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Sure will. It's completely separate from the checkout system.

Let us know if you have more questions.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Hi Carrie,
I do have one other question. Will it work with your Easy Variant View Mod?

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Yes it sure will. It should work with virtually any module out there. Off the top of my head I can't think of one it won't work with.

It's a really slick module. I'm really proud of our guy who put this one together. The code is like a piece of art. :D

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Hi Carrie,
Why the pricing of this module depends upon number of products or pages ?

This module is not based on SAAS architecture.

Is the code for 500 pages & 50000 page is different ?
If not then I guess it's begining of new kind module pricing strategy.

What happens if tomorrow CDSEO PRO will also have similar kind of pricing strategy for example
up to 100 products $50
100 to 5000 products $149
5001 to unlimited products $249

Your module features are very nice & as you said it works fine any kind of third party mods & template which is just fantastic.

But pricing depend upon number products !:( ...Please think over it again.

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Hi,

Thanks for your feedback.

The pricing though isn't based on SAAS. It's priced based upon the benefit to the store owner. A store with 100,000 products is going to get a lot more benefit than a store with just 100 products. Just look at the two demo sites and you can see the speed benefits. The 180 product site cached is 0.0021 seconds and non-cached it is 2.29 seconds. That's a speed increase of 1000 times faster! For the 100,000+ demo the speed goes from 0.0021 cached to 9.6932 seconds not cached. That's a speed increase of over 4600 times faster!

Normally a site with over 100,000 products has to run on a dedicated server. Here you can see one running successfully on a very small VM server. Right there you save several hundred dollars a month. Plus the increased sales and revenue on your site due to how fast it is (customer's won't tolerate slow websites for very long) plus google also gives higher priority on sites that are very speedy. The software could easily pay for itself in just a few months or less depending on what level you need.

It's also similar to the pricing for our Point of Sale and Product Importer Pro. Both of those are also based upon usage and benefit to the store and have been around for many years.

We had considered a flat fee, but the price would have been higher than the current minimum. We wanted though to make it more affordable for all store sizes. We felt having the tiered pricing made sense then to be proportional to how much it helped the store.

I'd be happy though to hear more feedback or if you find the pricing at a certain tier level not to be a good fit. We've already had quite a few orders at the current pricing level so we'd have to take that into consideration if we did decide to change the pricing based upon feedback.

Thank you,

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

How many categories and sub categories does the 100,000 product demo have

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Just curious, is the mod released yet?

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Hi the large one has 342 total categories. Of those 340, 59 are main categories and 283 are sub-categories.

Thanks,

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Yep sure is! We sent the first copies out this week and have scheduled the installs of the ones who purchased install.

Carrie

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

Hi Carrie,
I'm in the process of installing the mod now but there are a few discrepancies in the instructions. I just double checked my order and I believe I hit the wrong version when I ordered. I should be on 4.4.5 not 4.5.x. Can I get a download of the right one instead, or how does that work?

Re: X-cart Speed Booster!
 

We've made changes to clarify a step in the install instructions and also fixed our system to include those empty folders. Our software distribution system wasn't including empty folders.

Anyone who's already downloaded the software should download again to get the latest copy.

Thanks for letting us know!

Carrie