The Goal: BackCountry Gear came to us with a site load time of over 18 seconds. They were frustrated with their site’s sluggish speed and were worried that they were loosing customers before their site even loaded. The Solution:In efforts to assist BackCountry Gear in speeding up their site, we made the following changes:
- Catalog indexes were corrupt, so we truncated index tables.
- Catalog mode was EAV and not flat. As a result extremely long SQL queries were occurring. We enabled flat categories and flat products, which dropped load times by about 5 seconds
- We merged javascript files (System -> configuration -> developer -> javascript settings -> merge js
- We asked BackCountry Gear’s hosting provider to enable memcached which improves performance on the site overall.
- The exploding menu takes 3 seconds to generate. We stored the HTML for the menu in memcache so this code does not need to be executed, which sped up page load times by another 3 seconds.
After all of this – we still recommended upgrading their hosting plan –given the number of categories and products their store has. The Results: Our changes resulted in cutting 12 seconds off of BackCountry Gear’s loading time.
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Client feedback: After our work was completed BackCountry Gear was quite happy with the increased speed of their site. They quickly booked us for more projects and we have been assisting them ever since.