Website too slow
 

Hello,

We would like to know why our new website home page is taking so long to load.
Most of the time it takes about 45 seconds to completely load the page.

http://www.star500.com/shop/home.php

Can anyone tell me what the problem could be?

I am running version 4.5.4

Thanks

Re: Website too slow
 

Your home page loaded in 5-10 seconds on my laptop under Chrome. In any case, check the size of your banner image.

Re: Website too slow
 

The home page is about 1.1MB in size, and from our tests you're running less than 5 seconds. When I ran through http://tools.pingdom.com

There's connections out to facebook that could be causing some of the slowdown - can you try temporarily disabling those modules?

The "feat_children.png" image is also not loading. As a result, it'll slow down the site as it continues to try to load (http://www.star500.com/shop/skin/electronics_black/images/feat_children.png)

If you could combine some of your regular images like your forward/back arrows and lines and make them into a sprite - that would speed up things too. Also, pulling some of the data from a separate subdomain would help too. You could easily setup "template.star500.com" as a subdomain, point it to your template folder and have some of your more common template parts of X-Cart pull from that subdomain. A browser can pull data from 5 different domains(subdomains) at a time, but only pull 2 items of data per domain - that means it has to wait on "A & B" to deliver before sending "C". If you were using even ONE extra subdomain, you'd be delivering "A & B" and "C & D" at the same time.

Personally, it loaded fast for me, so it might have been a server load issue too.

Re: Website too slow
 

Also a lot of javascript is loaded or being loaded at the first time. It took me around 35-40 seconds to get the home page apear. The second time I went to your site was a lot faster.. I have had an excact same problem with a previous webshop of mine, a lot of javascript was running on the homepage and my site was really slow. I disabled a few javascripts and the site was loading a lot faster, 15-20 seconds faster. I changed a lot on the home page and made the most CSS driven. I took out several javascripts also. Plain and simple.
I know, some elements running on java that's why I turned my design completely around and now I have a fast site, home page also. I don't have many javascripts anymore and running now on xtreme gear template of the Xcartstore.com.

The site looks great though.

I think its a few issues bundled in one that causes the site to slow down.

Re: Website too slow
 

Make sure you have these options ticked in general settings.

Optimization settings:
1. Use speed-up tool for Javascript
2. Use speed-up tool for CSS
3. Do not check if templates are changed (Smarty compile_check).

Re: Website too slow
 

Conor, using a subdomain to provide components of a page is an interesting idea that I'd not come across before. If a site were to store commonly used images on a subdomain are there any significant SEO negatives associated with it, that you are aware of?

Re: Website too slow
 

No negatives really. For the most part, you're not optimizing your images to show in the "IMAGES" tab on google, so you may not get people clicking (and stealing) your images that way. That being said, naming your images for SEO purposes is still recommended.

I've used the multiple subdomain approach for many years. Between images, content, sprites and CSS, we have 5 different subdomains that we pull information from on a page load. They're all on the same machine too, so there's no fear that one subdomain will work and the other doesn't - resulting in a broken site.

Of course, with the advantage of CDN's, that makes things really fast too, but even still, we use a subdomain at the CDN for images, and another for CSS.

Never had a problem.

Re: Website too slow
 

Thanks Conor, I'll give it a go.

Just wondering though, will the leverage browser caching in my root folder .htaccess file apply to my subdomains, or do I need to set that up in an htaccess file within each subdomain folder? I don't want to assume it does.

Re: Website too slow
 

I use MaxCDN with 4 pull zones pulling in different lots of content. Definitely helps on page load times.

Re: Website too slow
 

I would very much like to assign resources to a subdomain but in 4.5.4 it is not clear where the image folders are assigned. In older versions I'd just reassign $imagedir to be the subdomain, but I'm at a loss with this version.

Can anyone point me in the right direction please? Has anyone set resources to be on a subdomain in 4.5.*?