Best way/how to improve page load speed performance

Hi,

Here is my site - http://www.4rissa.com

I am using OC version 1.5.6.4

What is the best method and how to improve the page load speed and performance?

Could someone suggest a recommended extension I can install?

Thanks in advance!

Rissa

Yes it is Slow.
Check your site in gtmetrix.com and you Will see it scores badly.
Also a single Page is More than 3 megs, wich is very Large for 1 Page.
Include pagecaching on serverlevel and optimizing database Will give significant Speed improvement.

Optimizing a site for maximum Speed needs specialized knowledge, of not comfortabele with IT leave IT to someone Who does

Hi,

there are a lot ways to improve your website's speed. If you don't know to much about site optimisation you should at least do this:
1. check if your server have enought resources to handle your site, you can check this with your hosting provider
2. check level 9 gzip compressing in admin settings
3. optimise your images
4. use a CDN depending on which country is your business. You can try cloudflare.com, is free, maybe it will help you.
5. contact an OpenCart developer or company that knows what site speed optimision is and how is done

Cheers!

Thank you

Does anyone have a recommendation / suggestion of the best extension I can install for page load speed optimization?

I am looking for some recommendations on the best extensions to improve site speed. Any ideas?

I'm having really good luck (qualified) with Cloudflare. There have been several hiccups on the way but so far all of them have been self-inflicted problems. The Cloudflare team have been great with tech support. I don't think they do phone support but I've never had to wait more than an hour for a reply.
We pay the smallest paid amount ($20 a month ish). That seems to get us more page rules but not some of the more advanced firewall capabilities. While I'd like to pay for the advanced features, that's not reality.
That said, when I began this journey I was getting page load times of > 45 seconds. Once I got Cloudflare fine tuned, they went down to approx. 0.5 seconds.
I have a free account at GTMetrix and run reports from time to time. Their recommendations are good as well. One of them that constantly comes up is image file sizes not being provided on page load. I found an OpenCart extension to handles that. https://www.opencart.com/index.php?rout ... _id=727327 Extension costs $10.
Cloudflare uses page rules that you can use to detail what get's cached and what doesn't. Free account only get's 3 which doesn't seem to be enough. I'm currently using 8.
We are still on OpenCart 1.5.6.4 so I don't know if this will change when I get the upgrade done.
I'm going to post to this forum my Cloudflare page rules to get feedback. Unlike WordPress, OpenCart doesn't have the Cloudflare install base that pushed them into writing specific whitepapers on configuration. Perhaps that will change soon. There is a bunch of stuff in this forum but some of it is saying things like "dump cloudflare"
Bottom line, I have had great page load improvements from this one thing.
Hope that helps.
john

better don't bother about, we told him multiple times, what needs to be done,
he just won't listen, asking repeated time for the same...:
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php ... 67#p613146
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php ... 32#p614232

Ernie

That is not very kind, IP_CAM, I am only a beginner at this - and also, you do not need to assume I am a "he" - in fact, I am a "she"

Any help and assistance is greatly appreciated, thank you.

Rissa

Just tested your site in gtmetrix, it obvius that you already did a lot to optimize your site, as the score is pretty good (92%)

although there are some things you can optimize more, set pictures size correct, on front page all pictures are resized from 220x220 to 212x212, so set picture site to 212 x 212 in admin.

also it takes more than 10 seconds for your page to load and its still more dan 2 mb big.

Not sure, but did you optimize your database and changed tables from myisam to innodb, if not that will improve speed a lot as wel.
Make sure youre comforatble with altrering a database,if not dont play with it)