OpenCart Community

Hey Everyone,

I have a site that has over 15k products and 750 categories + sub categories. My site is horribly slow to load pages (with the product counter off on the category bar on the side by the way). I know I am loosing customers because of the slow page loads and I would like to invest in a mod to speed up the whole site.

I have looked into many different mods and I am unsure of which to pick, let alone best bang for buck. My site is on a shared server and I am running OC ver. 1.5.4 with Linux.

I've read too many extension reviews to figure out myself if I need to spend over $100 for help from purchasing a mod.

Thanks in advance to any that can point me in a good direction.

Talk soon,

Please provide url address for your store

EDIT:
I would recommend this, a client mentioned that this works extremely well: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... arch=speed

Also as mentioned, VPS hosting for a store that large might also be a good idea.

I use Jay Gilford's Page Cache extension on OpenCartX.com, and it works pretty well for me.

Note that upgrading to a VPS may also help, since shared hosting is not great for such a large store.

My site is www.OsmondTools.com. For your extensions you purchased, what improvements did you notice, and did you notice anything odd or drawbacks?

Optimizing oc can be done very easy, without spending any money on commercial mods.

At this moment just finished my testsite, where im building a upgrade of one off my shops.
In this proces i decided to get it to maximum speed, now it will go up to 97% on google pagespeed.

I would love to test this on a store with a load of product and see if performance will be up there as well.

you can test for youself
http://magneetramen.com

If youre interested just drp me a PM.

Jay's extension makes all non-https pages cached, so they load much quicker (usually in hundredths of a second, instead of tenths to 1-2 seconds for some pages). The only downside I've found is that it doesn't work when a customer is logged in, because the session data controls some of what appears on a page, so it's difficult to cache an HTML when some of that data is changing.

My site will eventually be the flagship for my company, so I need to have it as quick as possible. The site is very vanilla at the moment until I can have some unique theme dreamed up and created special for my store. My industry is very cut throat and the better I look online, the better my company will thrive once my physical store opens up. I'm not looking to become amazon or ebay, but I need to at least start off as best I can.

I've looked into these mods:

http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... arch=cache

http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... arch=speed

They look like they both totally revamp the way the site would run.

Between these two extensions, the "Nitro Pack" which is $11 more seems just more flashy. Any opinions comparing the JAY6390 mod and the iSense "Nitro Pack" mod?

I haven't used Nitropack so I can't really comment, but I'll say that I see both of them in other users' stores (when I'm assisting with technical support), so they're both fairly popular.

for more on this, check here:
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php ... 25#p512325
and here:
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php ... 25#p512325

Ernie
openshop.li

IP_CAM wrote:for more on this, check here:
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php ... 25#p512325
and here:
http://forum.opencart.com/viewtopic.php ... 25#p512325

Ernie
openshop.li

I have tried quite a few "free" changes to my OC 1.5.4 that I have found scattered around the forums and the web. Changing the code on a few pages ended up not working because it did not reflect my version of OC. Enabling Gzip and trying a few slider ranges seemed to benefit slightly, but not really to an extent I am looking for. I am not a programmer but I have now learned quite a lot about my website and how the guts of it work together, and how to play with it to make it work how you want. My issue is to get to the next level I would need a much higher level of understanding on how the site works and tailor it to my application. But I am not at that level of knowledge of php and MySQL to "optimize" how it runs.

I know mods/extensions are a great plug and play fix to most obvious issues at an obvious financial cost, but to manually changes source files may affect my future changes to the theme I am looking to have made. I have already changed some source files for minor mods that I will need to fix or make sure are integrated in my new theme.

I read a review of the nitro pack that was unbiased and very opinionated. I am wondering the difference between the two? They seem quite similar.....

@vnlvet: you should possibly be looking to move up to a never version to match, what's offered today...

I have been doing a lot of tests lately, by use of different OC-Versions as well as different setup's. Just last night, I installed the latest Test-OCv.1.5.6.4, and enhanced it with the famous OpenShop v1.7 Extension. This way, I have direct Admin SQL-Access, VqModding, VqMod-Manager, Filemamager and lots of other Goodies implemented in one big step.

Then, I added 15'000 test products, by use of 2'240pc. of 500px-sample product images by Use of IsenseLab's ProductsGenerator. I did NOT switch off Product-Counters, and, exept for the Pageload-Time-Counter and Sub-Domain-Product-Image-Call, the Software has not been manipulated.

Checking on the DB, I found out, that OC v.1.5.6.4 SEEMS to have much more 'preset' INDEXING done, compared to the v.1.5.6.1 Version, at least, I found, after using ATOMIX Full Indexer, many more Sections PRE-INDEXED by Default. Reading somewhere, that Indexing has been widely removed on v.1.5.6 Versions, I assume, that this 'Decision' has been revoked, after realizing, that OC-Performance has dropped so baldy, as it seems, when reading many Posts...

However, the ATOMIX TURBO.PHP Script enables not only to Switch the MyISAM DB-engine to INNODB, it also allows one to FULL-INDEX the entire default DB. So, I indexed the DB, but leaving it as MyISAM, because earlier test have shown that there is so much difference between them, at least performanse-wise.

The biggest Performance-Killers are LATEST, FAVORITES, whatever, or worse, Images-Sliders, Carrousells and other Garbage, most of them really have no purpose anyway, exept for trying to make an impression. Still, a lot of Fellows concentrate on such shiny FRONT PAGE stuff, instead of concentrating on really important things. No wonder, they all fail...

Now see, how this works:

http://www.openshop.li/cart/index.php?route=common/home

Sure, the one or other additional Mod could be added, but in general, on a 'decent' shared Server, a default v.1.5.6.4 works very, very well.

Ernie
ipc.li/shop/

@IP_CAM Thank you for that info about the new OC version. I had read that the new version is faster but I did not see any direct speed comparisons between the older 1.5.4 and the new one. I will need to do some testing on the new version before I would put it up on my site. I am happy with the stability of my version so far, and I would prefer the new OC has gone through some more rounds of bashing before I would rely on it for my company.

Chris