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