Help to Decrease Home page size?

[bathroomboy]

Hi,

I have been comparing the load times of my page to our competitors, but cannot get anywhere near some of them. Are there items loading that can be reduced?

It seems that the 'homepage' file affects all pages although most of the content is not on the product pages

I am no expert, so any tips would be appreciated

See an example here:

http://bathroomstudio.co.uk/taps-and-showers/cat_73.html

Many thanks!

[Robsta]

Load times depend on the number of images, the speed of your hosting server, and the speed of your internet connection. The homepage as the most images on, ie the latest products.

[bsmither]

I believe there to be nothing specific to Cubecart to speed up page delivery, but there are things you can do generally:

1. Page caching: Product data and category lists tend to be static - delivering the same information from one page request to the next. Utilities exist to cache these pages which cancels the need for PHP processing and database access. The homepage with it's Featured/Random Product and it's Favorite Products changing nature, is not suited for typical caching.

2. Compression: Category lists tend to have highly repetitive HTML coding - offering extraordinary levels of compression. Utilities exist to GZIP pages for smaller content-length delivery.

3. Imagery resolution: The JPG file format offers a tradeoff between clarity of image vs file size. The (now mostly defunct) "Get DSL speed on your Dialup connection" subscriptions used this to an insidious extreme.

With regard to brute-force computing power and the quality of your internet connection, a chain is as good as it's worst link. So, if your "last mile" of hops between server to client (that's you) is the worst quality (download speed, latency, etc), then the difference in hosting server power makes no noticeable difference.

I also believe that CubeCart's SQL queries are optimized good enough for the typical CC store inventory. I have read messages that discuss problems when the inventory gets to 10,000 products with thousands of options per product. In that case, it might be time to host on a dedicated or co-located server and get away from the hobbyist level of hosting (not saying that you are).

[bathroomboy]

I believe there to be nothing specific to Cubecart to speed up page delivery, but there are things you can do generally:

1. Page caching: Product data and category lists tend to be static - delivering the same information from one page request to the next. Utilities exist to cache these pages which cancels the need for PHP processing and database access. The homepage with it's Featured/Random Product and it's Favorite Products changing nature, is not suited for typical caching.

2. Compression: Category lists tend to have highly repetitive HTML coding - offering extraordinary levels of compression. Utilities exist to GZIP pages for smaller content-length delivery.

3. Imagery resolution: The JPG file format offers a tradeoff between clarity of image vs file size. The (now mostly defunct) "Get DSL speed on your Dialup connection" subscriptions used this to an insidious extreme.

With regard to brute-force computing power and the quality of your internet connection, a chain is as good as it's worst link. So, if your "last mile" of hops between server to client (that's you) is the worst quality (download speed, latency, etc), then the difference in hosting server power makes no noticeable difference.

I also believe that CubeCart's SQL queries are optimized good enough for the typical CC store inventory. I have read messages that discuss problems when the inventory gets to 10,000 products with thousands of options per product. In that case, it might be time to host on a dedicated or co-located server and get away from the hobbyist level of hosting (not saying that you are).

Many thanks for your reply.

I have read Homar's interesting piece on site compression and I have Gzipped the index and cart pages. I have also loaded his compression script which has helped. (thank you Homar)

However, I know you can combine scripts into one download. I wondered whether this was a good idea? I also see you can compress the site in Apache. Is this a good idea - or does it remove the option of editing files at a later date? It seems that some search engines favour lighter data sites.

I don't know what the average cubecart site is in size. Ours is currently runnning approx 82kb.

Or am I being paranoid :w00t: