150 visits a day no sales

[berklee.grad]

Greetings All,

 

helping a friend with their site -

 

Since they have gone live on Prestashop they average at least 125 visitors per day (often more than 200). Sadly they have had NO sales - not one!

 

Their previous site, which was a HTML site, garnered at least several sales a month. Quite a frustrating experience for the site owner.

 

Their site url is www.halleminlures.com

 

All comments and suggestions are appreciated.

 

thank you in advance, -Rick

[ubergirl]

Hello, first of all, the site is extremely slow, and the diaporama doesn't before some time. I would look into the "cache" preferences. Also, the homepage design is too amateurish for the general pricing of the items... just my two cents. Good luck

[El Patron]

Just went through to purchase a lure, $17.50 but 7.00 shipping.

 

IMHO it's to much shipping.  You could easily send these 1st class mail for much cheaper, or at least offer that.

 

Personally I would offer free shipping and build that into my prices.

 

You may also want to have an alternate payment method, i.e. paypal google wallet, as we already have our cc information stored there and to lazy to dig out a cc number and input it.

 

Your site is pretty slow and I am in KCMO.  I looked at typical culprits gzip/browser cache but it looks like you have those set up correctly.  So most likely just throttling by your hosting provider..(typically done to get you to upgrade to faster server).

 

Love your products and in general you shop is easy enough to navigate.

[berklee.grad]

thanks for the input so far from el Patron and ubergirl - that is exactly what I was hoping to get!

 

Site owner is hosted at ipage.com any suggestions on how to get them to speed it up? Or should I urge the client to invest in the cdn options?

[El Patron]

there is no gurantee that cdn will do it.

 

I'd google search for some website testing tools....see what the speeds are

 

make sure to check back office-->advanced parms-->performance and make  sure the setting look like or very similar

 

also scroll down and make sure if for example you are not using combinations or features that you  turn this off

 

also check your menu module, if you have on, they tend to have a cache switch

 

http://screencast.com/t/w5Zw4yCy

[berklee.grad]

El Patron,

 

thank you for your insight into the CDN. 

 

I have been using both pingdom tools and gtmetrix to review the site....

 

GTMetrix reports:

Page load time: 4.41s
Total page size: 806KB
Total number of requests: 39

 

and reports Grades of F to E for the following: (except I know gZip is enabled )

Specify image dimensions

F (0)

49%

Images High Leverage browser caching

F (3)

57%

Server High Combine images using CSS sprites

F (0)

69%

Images Medium Enable gzip compression

F (8)

81%

Server High Enable Keep-Alive

E (53)

96%

Server High Serve resources from a consistent URL

D (66)

95%

Content High Defer parsing of JavaScript

C (71)

65%

JS High

 

Pingdom tools reports similar:

Tested from New York City, New York, USA on September 5 at 19:52:36

• Page size - 824.8kB
• Load time - 4.25s
• Requests - 43
• Perf. grade 73/100

 

pingdom's also is reporting Load Time Analysis Time Spent per State Wait 48.29%   Connect 40.89%   Receive 6.85%   DNS 3.95%   Send 0.02% Time Spent per Content Type Image 75.07%   HTML 20.90%   Script 2.41%   CSS 1.22%   Other 0.41%

 

have verified that the advanced parameters are same as per your suggestion...

 

I am in Orlando so when I run pingplotter from here to the host I get the following:

Target Name: www.halleminlures.com
         IP: 66.96.182.208
  Date/Time: 9/5/2013 8:02:05 PM

 1    4 ms    0 ms    0 ms    0 ms    0 ms    2 ms  [192.168.1.1]
 2   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
 3   32 ms   33 ms   28 ms   26 ms   27 ms   28 ms  108-193-156-2.lightspeed.dybhfl.sbcglobal.net [108.193.156.2]
 4   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
 5   30 ms   27 ms   29 ms   28 ms   31 ms   28 ms  [70.159.207.70]
 6   32 ms   48 ms   32 ms   31 ms   30 ms   31 ms  [12.81.78.4]
 7   31 ms   31 ms   30 ms   31 ms   31 ms   31 ms  [12.81.78.47]
 8   36 ms   36 ms   36 ms   35 ms   34 ms   33 ms  [12.83.22.188]
 9   31 ms   30 ms   29 ms   29 ms   31 ms   30 ms  [12.81.28.47]
10   31 ms   31 ms   31 ms   31 ms   30 ms   31 ms  [74.175.192.14]
11   47 ms   42 ms   44 ms   44 ms   44 ms   42 ms  cr1.ormfl.ip.att.net [12.122.106.10]
12   46 ms   45 ms   46 ms   42 ms   43 ms   47 ms  cr2.attga.ip.att.net [12.122.31.29]
13   61 ms   42 ms   41 ms   42 ms   43 ms   44 ms  [12.122.140.245]
14   94 ms   92 ms   92 ms   91 ms   93 ms   94 ms  [192.205.36.238]
15  N/A      93 ms  N/A     N/A      93 ms   92 ms  be2053.mpd22.atl01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.3.145]
16   87 ms   95 ms  N/A     100 ms   95 ms  100 ms  te0-4-0-7.ccr22.dca01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.42.197]
17   64 ms  N/A     N/A      62 ms  N/A      63 ms  te0-2-0-2.mpd22.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.5.49]
18  N/A     N/A     N/A     N/A     N/A      70 ms  te0-4-0-3.ccr22.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.44.66]
19   69 ms   68 ms   68 ms   68 ms   69 ms   68 ms  endurance-international-group.demarc.cogentco.com [38.97.106.34]
20   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
21   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
22   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
23   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
24   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
25   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
26   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
27   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
28   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
29   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
30   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
31   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
32   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
33   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
34   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]
35   *       *       *       *       *       *       [-]

Destination not reached in 35 hops

 

fyi pingdom tools ping shows: 100% packet loss

 

again, thank you for your help!

 

best regards, -Rick

[berklee.grad]

  On 9/5/2013 at 9:18 PM, El Patron said:

Just went through to purchase a lure, $17.50 but 7.00 shipping.

 

IMHO it's to much shipping.  You could easily send these 1st class mail for much cheaper, or at least offer that.

 

Personally I would offer free shipping and build that into my prices.

 

 

El Patron,

 

site owner has agreed that free shipping on the lures seems like good idea! Thank you!

 

While I am CMS conversant - I am new to Prestashop, is there an EASY to enable free shipping for an entire category? Or do I need to create a new carrier with free shipping and enable it for each item individually?

 

Sorry for such a Prestashop nooB question ;-) Am also reading the manual....

 

and again, thank you for your help,     -Rick

[El Patron]

  On 9/6/2013 at 12:58 PM, berklee.grad said:

El Patron,

 

site owner has agreed that free shipping on the lures seems like good idea! Thank you!

 

While I am CMS conversant - I am new to Prestashop, is there an EASY to enable free shipping for an entire category? Or do I need to create a new carrier with free shipping and enable it for each item individually?

 

Sorry for such a Prestashop nooB question ;-) Am also reading the manual....

 

and again, thank you for your help,     -Rick

 

Hi Rick,

 

I suggest that you open new post,  assuming searching you can not find the answer, for any questions  that arise from site review.  This will get better community feedback as those in the know will see it and can respond.

[berklee.grad]

El Patron,

 

understood!  Thank you.

[El Patron]

make sure to post back here when ready for us to take another look...pretty excited to see the improvements....

[matigemelli]

make the changes! and get back to us!

[El Patron]

it's taking much tiempo to load your site...so the performance is well, horrible.  Are you seeing the same from your end?  I am in Missouri with a so so connection speed (Time Warner waiting on my google fiber).

 

Make sure to check your back office-->performace--> settings...i.e.  smarty etc.

[berklee.grad]

El Patron & matigemelli

 

thank you for your input - I have been working through much of the issues and as it turns out the random generator for the front page 'slide show' seems to be the culprit - I'll get that squared away as soon as my friend decides what he wants in that space instead ;-)

 

I'll post back when that has been accomplished.

 

again thanks for your continued input.

[berklee.grad]

El Patron,

 

the host is saying that it is the simpleslideshow module that is casing the slow down.... I have seen this implemented other places and see that it functions much more quickly than on our site....

 

That being said, I removed all of the previous really large images from  the directory - even though they were not toggled to display AND I have reduced the size of the revolving images to about 45k in size (still large - but, much smaller than they were)...

 

When you have another chance, please take another look to see if the site is still loading as slowly as previously mentioned.

http://www.halleminlures.com/

 

many thanks for you continued help.

 

regards, -Rick

[Qvixx]

Hi,

 

Just tested it ant it's really **** slow.

The site does look fine in my opinion but with these loading times ... horrible for a client.

 

I compared your page and my page (also prestashop). See the image below.

http://abload.de/img/untitleddksq2.png

 

From webpagetest.org:

 

URL: http://www.halleminlures.com/
Host: www.halleminlures.com
IP: 66.96.182.208
Location: Burlington, MA
Error/Status Code: 200
Client Port: 51506
Start Offset: 0.204 s
DNS Lookup: 149 ms
Initial Connection: 54 ms
Time to First Byte: 4890 ms
Content Download: 49 ms
Bytes In (downloaded): 6.9 KB
Bytes Out (uploaded): 0.3 KB

 

Check out this page. The guy there had the same issue:

 

http://www.prestashop.com/forums/topic/253785-solved-impossibly-slow-loading-pages-time-to-first-byte-7-seconds/

 

Greets.

Edited October 4, 2013 by Qvixx (see edit history)

[El Patron]

check out is 'weird'...

 

I'd move this to the bottom 'Customers who bought this product also bought:' as it one can not see how to check out unless the scroll down...nobody wants to scroll/hunt/click anymore than they have to...and I would use one page checkout...or at least try to see how this changes the flow..

 

note: check your google analytics  --contnet--exit pages...find out where they are bailing

 

also on the front page...I'd get rid of the 'text' and create a cms page 'about lures' for example...

 

also if not already, include loyalty points...

[berklee.grad]

Qvixx,

 

thank you for taking the time to review and respond.  Appreciate the link abt the memcache bug....

 

El Patron,

 

thank you for your continued suggestions! They are appreciated.

 

We are moving hosts to a prestashop recommended 'partner' and hopefully that should resolve the slow factor. Design issues are 'another kettle of fish' ;-)

 

thank you both again!

[El Patron]

your site was not slow until I clicked checkout..

 

and it's all about the design...

 

5 step checkout is,  how do I say this, gone with animated gifs..jajajaja

 

good luck

[Sahya]

As a suggestion, in your homepage I would move the photos of the lures to the top or to a column

I just see text when I visit your shop, and only if I scroll down do I see the product you want to sell.

Also, as Ubergirl mentioned, I think the font you're using makes the homepage look too amateurish.

hope this helps!