Super Fast Page Load Ecommerce Platforms

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greenleaves

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Jan 25, 2008
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I'm thinking of moving off my current ecommerce platform to another one.

The main reason right now is the fact that woocommerce, while a decent solution, get's buggy with too many products.

Now that I'm moving, I have a list of things I need. But topping the list is moving to a super fast platform.

I want my first time page loads to be in at 3 seconds or less, consistently. Right now I'm getting more like 5. Yuck.

I was doing testing on sites in the 'showcase/feature' section of various providers like Volution. But individual decisions prove to create too much variance for any value in comparing load times of different sites on different platforms (it has to be done, same site, different platforms)

So... can anyone here recommend me an eCommerce platform designed with ultra light/effective coding/server resource usage in mind? I mean, something where I can find a decent template and get going... not something that requires tons of customization.

Am I delusional that I will get under the 3second range on a site that will need to make at least 75 server calls/pull in 1meg worth of data?

Right now, I'm looking at magento. The problem is I need costly customizations to get it where I would want it, plus... I hate to have to deal with hosting (much, much, much rather pay monthly fees ala volution... but volution templates tend to be super dirty when it comes to coding and I'm not impressed with the site speeds I'm seeing from volution hosted sites)
 


You've optomized images and done everything you can with the existing framework?

You don't have like 500 items loading on a page do you rather than breaking it into results of 10-25 results at a time?

Not a shitload of "widgets" used are there? (haven't used that framework but while convenient they can slow shit down)

You've checked validation? Are there errors? Warnings with any of your code?

Can you load stuff asynchronously, load what's viewable immediately and the rest as it's available
 
Cs-cart on it's own server is pretty fast and easy to setup out of the box. Magento was a monster that I could never really figure out and seemed extremely slow.
 
We run a site with 100 products on magento - and it's pretty fast. Just choose magento optimized hosting.
p.s. if you have more than 1000 products magento might be not the best solution though, otherwise +1 for magento
 
Volusion is definitely not your best solution. DEFINITELY NOT.

You sound like you are at a point where a real custom solution is necessary. PrestaShop is a great platform. I'm a big Zen Cart guy. Thing is with each mysql call, it's going to depend on your hosting at the end of the day. More features = More db calls = increased latency. Just like wordpress = too many plugins = disaster waiting to happen.

At a certain point you're going to have to compromise some features OR go with a customized solution with a serious hosting solution (maybe Amazon), you may have outgrown the capabilities of the off the shelf solutions.
 
Magento is decent with the right hosting, something like simplehelix. They also offer a hosted solution - Magento Go.
 
CCarter said:
Volusion is definitely not your best solution. DEFINITELY NOT.

You sound like you are at a point where a real custom solution is necessary. PrestaShop is a great platform. I'm a big Zen Cart guy. Thing is with each mysql call, it's going to depend on your hosting at the end of the day. More features = More db calls = increased latency. Just like wordpress = too many plugins = disaster waiting to happen.

At a certain point you're going to have to compromise some features OR go with a customized solution with a serious hosting solution (maybe Amazon), you may have outgrown the capabilities of the off the shelf solutions.
Click to expand...

How do you cope with Zen Cart? I'm guessing you mod the daylights out of it? It just seems so...not 2013ish, don't know any other way to say it.
 
I don't know about your current hosting setup but if you have a caching layer available you could prerender your index page using phantom.js, cache the results and serve that up instead of making 75 server calls for images and db queries every time.
 
MSTeacher said:
How do you cope with Zen Cart? I'm guessing you mod the daylights out of it? It just seems so...not 2013ish, don't know any other way to say it.
Click to expand...

It does everything I need it to do. Backend is not the best looking at all, but it works. I've got several major site running off of it. Magento's pretty backend, but slow as shit. Zen's not pretty at all, but works, that's the key. ;)
 
before you move, read up on wordpress optimization


optimize your html, css, js first

get a cache plugin if you dont have one

get a cdn

after that, maybe move to nginx based and not apache

if all else fails, then look into moving to prestashop/zen cart/open cart
 
Prestashop and/or OpenCart, but with a page cache that allows for "holes" like the cart widget to render dynamically. Codebase for either is still relatively new and thus, less full of cruft...meaning they are probably easier to optimize. You can either pay $100 or so for a commercial page cache made for them, or tinker around with varnish or similar until it works correctly.

You might be surprised how much you can gain from optimizations that would work with any cart. Image spriting, consolidating css and javascript, etc. Then, optimize the crap of the thumbnail images (see gifsicle, jpegoptim, etc).

I have the page load time for my pinnacle cart sites down to subsecond...pinnacle has built-in page caching, but I can't recommend it anymore since they've decided to move to an all SaaS model.
 
Magento is fucking ridiculous, it does something like 500 database queries just to load a product category page.

I built my own platform using a noSQL database. ONE QUERY, MOTHERFUCKERS. Considering releasing it either as a basic hosted platform and\or standalone installation eventually.

Fuck Shopify with their transaction fees too.

I'm getting the use of 2 small Microsoft Azure virtual machines at the moment for free, that's nice for hosting.
 
We run around 2-3s with MIVA on a product page with a large image, and decent header image. Less than 1.5s on a primed cache of the same page.

We've found MIVA to be extremely fast, and responsive and the backend has a TON of options. It is, however, not super simple like some other solutions but the options and options with add-ons are great.

The support used to be better, ironically now that they charge more for 24hr support it's a bit slower.

I haven't compared speed but for "cheaper" clients we use X-Cart.


I should note were not using css sprites, cdn, and haven't done "in depth" page-load analysis for the sites I just mentioned. So I`m sure we could shave 1s off rather easily. This is actually something I`m working on right now for one of the clients so I`ll update this with performance increases when I get there.
 
Magento sucks, costly to modify, host, and scale. I get sick and tired of indian losers on linkedin pimping it likes it's the best thing ever. CS-cart is insanely difficult to modify for themes, plus it's limited. Volusion sucks period. The rest of the open source stuff you get what you pay for, then to make them work right you end up buying addons, plugins, themes to get them working the way you want. Plus I don't buy the idea of fourm support as a method of supporting a product.

Wordpress can scale, you just need to put the right pieces in place. Woocommerce is an interesting platform, another one with more $$ plugins to make it work better. But wordpress is easy to modify and so far it's better than cart66 as a choice. Look at getting a better hosting platform, caching, CDN, better web server, and optimize your assets. The only other inexpensive ecom solution I'd look at is Lemonstand, but either way your back to building out the right set of hosting components to make it meet your needs.

Cheap and easy method in the interim, step 1 is to start with hosting, clone your current site and do some web speed tests until you find a good page load time. Then start optimizing your site.
 
I would really consider the cache option. You could optimize tons of things to bring your page execution from say 1000 ms to 800 ms, or you could just cache your pages and bring it down to 200 ms.

I would also do what everyone else has mentioned with loading your assets. Have all images loaded from another box. Have all CSS and JS each combined into 1 file and load them from a different box if necessary. Have your main server just load the necessary HTML and then AJAX and CDN all the extra stuff in once the page is up.

It comes down to how flexible you are in optimizing the code. I use Drupal Commerce for my cart sites because I can dial in pretty much all aspects. I can easily cache and CDN my pages to where there is very little initial load time.

I don't know your financial/server situation, but most of these things can be done pretty cheap. You can CDN through S3 fairly cheap and probably cache pretty well off a VPS.

BTW, 3 seconds is terrible, especially for an ecommerce site. Anything over 500 ms is pushing it IMO.
 
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