Is your Zencart slow? Zencart optimization guide

Did you know that, unless the users really need to see the content on your site, most wait no longer than 5 seconds before moving to another site. And with the huge number of sites on the internet, they have MANY choices. To avoid losing potential customers, one of the most important things you want to make sure is that your users can experience lightning fast speed when they visit your site, and here are several tips for you:

Don’t skim on hosting: most small business store owners are tight on budget, but that’s no reason to opt for the sluggish 5usd/month hosting. If you are on one of those hosts, there is a 100% chance that you will have to share the server’s resources with hundreds if not thousands other sites. Imagine what happens if some of those other sites utilize some resource intensive script?

Also, “shared hosting” is the most invulnerable type of hosting plan, if a hacker got into one of your neighbors’ system they can find many backdoors to attack your site.

Zencart has a bunch of Certified Hosts which you can check here. If you are in need of 24/7, 365 days a year support plus under 30 mins response time then JaguarPC’s services are highly recommend: Jaguar VPS let you share the server with a small number of other sites, and you have FULL control over the hosting and can install the softwares you need (by the way, open the ticket to have them install server’s related softwares for you, it’s more convenient and most of the time the cost is….ZERO). If your site later grows to have lots of visitors and products you can ask them to move you to a dedicated server which has all the resources dedicated to you only (ask them to move the whole site for you, again the cost is ZERO).

What if you can’t upgrade host now or you are already on a very good host (and still slow)? There are many settings which you can easily adjust to optimize your performance. One important note: if you can avoid using attributes at all, don’t use attributes or at least try to reduce the number of attributes. Zencart 1.3.8 and previous versions have a huge performance problem with product attributes.

There are more you can do, first take a look at several modules and tweaks provided by data-diggers on his site. There are many useful modules for zencart on the site, but do pay special attention to Query Cache module, it really helps with performance optimization.

Optimize your images: if your sites server images that are more than several hundred KB in size, you can’t expect the site to loads fast. No matter how fast your host is, if your users are on slow connections then you can say goodbye to many potential customers. Make sure you optimize your images before uploading to the site by:

1. Cropping or Resizing large images. Most products don’t need images that are larger than the users’ screens
2. Use slightly lower quality images. You can reduce the image quality a bit without really affecting users’ experiences.
3. Install Image Handler2 which will automatically helps you to crop and resize images.

Compress CSS and Minify Javascript files: yes, you can reduce your css and js file size by compressing and minifying. It is also recommended that you should try to combine multiple css files into one if possible (same for js files), less files = less server requests = faster load time.

Special Note: RubikIntegration is going to release a FREE module that will automatically compress, minify, and combining css and javascript files for you. So make sure you subscribe to our newsletter or our Feed to get the news!!!

Edit: Yes it is released here: http://blog.rubikintegration.com/2009/08/08/zencart-css-javascript-loader-released/

Using other modules: MageneticOne has released a (paid) cache module which claims to help, if you want you can buy it here for a special price. And if you do use it, let us know if it really helps.