Help w/ Configuration: 10 Second Page Load Time

[Nikki22]

Hello all,

 

I am fairly new here. I'm developing a PrestaShop site for my business, and I'm just at the very beginning of the process. However, before I go much further I wanted to take the time to make sure I'm setting things up correctly.

 

Right now, the shop loads unacceptable slowly. I see page load and transitions time of no less than 5 seconds, and no more than 10 seconds. There is hardly anything on the site, and I have made on one modification (stopping the truncation of titles in the Product List).

 

So, I think there is an issue somewhere. I am guessing that it's my server situation. The site is currently hosted in a shared hosting environment (HostGator), with no possibility for memcached. I know enough to build this site for myself, but I don't know enough to understand whether or not this could be significantly slowing down my shop's performance.

 

Below, I have posted my settings from Preferences > Performance. Would you be so kind as to look at them and offer suggestions? Also, I would love general feedback on what I should do to speed the site up. Would switching to a different host help, and, if so, any suggestions?

 

Thanks for your help,

 

- Nikki

 

Force Compile: No

Cache: Yes

 

Smart cache for CSS: Use CCC

Smart cache for JavaScript: Use CCC

Minify HTML: Minify HTML

Compress inline JavaScript in HTML: Compress...

High risk HTML compression: HTML is compressed but cancels...

 

Media Servers: All fields empty (is this a problem?)

 

Ciphering: Use Rijndael with mcrypt lib.

 

Using Caching: OFF

[popcorn1985]

I had the same problem for months - nothing I did seemed to make much of a difference until the whole thing ground to a halt and it became unusable.

 

So I switched hosts - we were going to anyway, but it gave us the push we needed. Am now with a great hosting company which even offered a fully supported one click install of prestashop. It's on a shared server so not lightening speed, but more than acceptable for what we need. Had a problem with the memory on a page with lots of attributes and they just upped it for me no problems, no fee increase! We have been with them for 2 weeks and it's the best move we ever did - and have had more orders because of it! Whichever hosts you use I would say from experience sort it out sooner rather than later - we put it off for months and lost out because of it! And it's only costing about £5 a month!

 

Check them out http://my.kualo.com/uk/go/00502/webhosting

 

My website is resources.kingfisher.org.uk if you want to check out speed - as I said its on a shared server so not lightening fast but I think pretty good!!

 

Hope it helps

[El Patron]

please provide a link

[Nikki22]

Sure. The link is http://TheDancingPeanut.com

The slow load time is especially pronounced when clicking on a category page, or when clicking between items.

[tdr170]

On the first page load it took about 5 seconds on the second load about 3 and on the third it was almost instant.

So It may be your browser settings or your actual internet service as the page loaded fine for me.

I was using IE when viewing your page.

[Nikki22]

On the first page load it took about 5 seconds on the second load about 3 and on the third it was almost instant.

So It may be your browser settings or your actual internet service as the page loaded fine for me.

I was using IE when viewing your page.

 

I appreciate the feedback.

But, don't you think 5 and 3 seconds is too long when you're trying to convert sales?

 

It's not even a question of taking 5 seconds to load all of the elements. The issues is that if you click to a new item, and the site hangs on its current pages for 3-5 seconds, that's going to get really frustrating.

 

So I guess I'm asking: what causes that, and what could fix it? Would upgrading to a VPS improve that?

[Nikki22]

A note: I did speed things up by reducing the number of items per page, but I'd still like it to be spiffier.

[tdr170]

No not really, fact is there is alot going on, all the info, item names, prices, quanity and so on are pulled from the database and have to be parsed to the browser.

The First visit to any page with this amount of info will take a few seconds to load, visits after that will load much faster as the browser can then pull info from its own cache file.

You can speed things up a little by going to your preferences and changing the below items:

 

Smart cache for CSS

Use CCC for CSS.

 

Smart cache for JavaScript

Use CCC for JavaScript.

 

Minify HTML

Minify HTML after "smarty compile" execution.

 

Compress inline JavaScript in HTML

Compress inline JavaScript in HTML after "smarty compile" execution

 

High risk HTML compression

Keep W3C validation (leave as standard)

 

Also edit your config.inc.php file found in the config folder to the following setting

Line 44 - ini_set('memory_limit','96M');

 

If you can edit your PHP.INI file through your servers control panel scroll through the file you will find two iems to set examples below.

 

(copied from my PHP.INi)

zlib.output_compression = On (turn to on off by default)

memory_limit = 96M ; Maximum amount of memory a script may consume

 

 

 

These will help some.

If you need help with any of these please feel free to ask.

[Nikki22]

Those configuration tweaks really helped--thanks!

Is 96 the max value I can/want to use?

[tdr170]

From what I have read Prestashop is happy at 64 so 96 should do it.