Optimizing X-Cart5 Load Times
 

Hi Guys,

I am an existing 3.5x branch of X-Cart, using for 10 years now so now moving to a new cart (I had plenty of mods and it was still working for me, so didn't moving to the 4.x branch). Getting a custom design from X-Cart based on the new X-Cart5 Business (running on my own cloud account). I have the initial design delivered but still some customization work to be done before launching in new year.

I had been looking at the speed of this new X-Cart5 and comparing it to my older, 3.5x X-Cart, thinking the new system is modern and is better for updating but it seems like it needs a lot more resources and it is slower to load. Well, I have been reading a few posts in this forum to see if anyone has hints to help speed things up and I saw some mention to compression and page load tests.

Here's what I did and I can say it made a noticeable difference. I feel like it should be fast enough now to deploy.

1) I visited this site http://www.webpagetest.org where you can get a free test of your site page and get useful feedback on what time it takes to load the various elements, plus hints at to what you can do. I tried to improve things by optimizing the images e.g. slimmed down the JPEGs and saved them as progressive types.
2) I made sure that gzip was running on my cPanel server and was turned on.
3) I used the Optimize websites option (in my cPanel account) to enable compression for all my content (it was set to off by default). This made a huge difference. Although I use cPanel you should be able to do something similar on other panels I would assume.

p.s. for some reason the Amazon S3 module seemed to slow my page load times, so I transferred all images back and de-activated that module.

I attach a couple of screen shots that may help.

Interested to hear what others can/have done and if any other tips to optimize/speed things up?

Regards, Phil

Re: Optimizing X-Cart5 Load Times
 

Hi Phil!

Thank you for sharing tips.
I have recently started an article about speeding X-Cart up:
http://kb.x-cart.com/display/XDD/Speeding+up+your+store

You can find useful info there as well.

As for your findings, do I understand you correctly that Optimize website option (point 3) had the biggest impact on load speed? How would you measure effect of points 1, 2? How much speed did they give to you?

Tony.

Re: Optimizing X-Cart5 Load Times
 

Compressing the site using gzip/deflate is the single biggest improvement you can make. I've seen page load time cut in half with this option. Next is optimizing images.

Re: Optimizing X-Cart5 Load Times
 

I don't have any info from the image optimisations, but overall it just helped to reduce the size of the block of data that needs to be downloaded upon the first load (so it was less of an impact, but it certainly helps to optimise the subsequent compression step).

For the enabling of compression I have just done a test with the compression enabled and disabled (see attached pics). The first page load is approximately 40% faster due to the compression being enabled. The subsequent page reloads are faster and roughly the same, since they are using the local cache, as per your guide http://kb.x-cart.com/display/XDD/Speeding+up+your+store Tony.

I hope this helps give you a feel for the benefits, it's certainly worthwhile to have a look at enabling the compression.

Regards, Phil

Re: Optimizing X-Cart5 Load Times
 

Thank you, Phil!

Re: Optimizing X-Cart5 Load Times
 

I have Cpanel and just turned on the Optimize Website - my score on webpage test went from 68/100 to 84/100 . I have an unmodified 4.6.5
How do you go about saving images as progressive ?

Re: Optimizing X-Cart5 Load Times
 

I did this by opening and re-saving my graphics files in PhotoShop (there were only 2 or 3 main images from the home page like my main header graphics). I believe there are batch image processing programs out there that enable you to do the same operation to lots of images automatically.

Regards, Phil