[Solved] Homepage Loading Speed

[Rich Walker]

Hi People

I've been trying to speed up the homepage loading time on my prestashop. At the moment it takes 11.2 sec's to load the homepage. Once you’re on the website navigating to other pages on the site loads really quickly.
I've added the following to my .htaccess file, which enables compression.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/js application/javascript 

   ExpiresActive On
   ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"

Can anyone recommend trying anything else?

Cheers

Rich

[rocky]

I suggest minifying your global.css into global.min.css and linking to it instead of global.css, and packing your JS into separate files like product.pack.js. Doing this reducing the initial load time of your website.

Another thing you can do is combine your images into CSS sprites. Downloading one big image is faster than downloading many small images, since there is less overhead. It is best to wait until you've finalised your design before doing this.

[Rich Walker]

Right I've found out what has been causing my homepage to load slowly. If i remove the module Data mining for statistics v1.0 from the footer hook. The page loads within 2.5 sec's.

[mytheory.]

Rich,

Wow! That's interesting! I can't wait to give that a try... Our site loads relatively fast, but not 2.5 seconds fast.

What does the data mining for statistics actually do? If I wanted to keep tabs on my site, isn't this a necessary module?

Thanks!

[Joachim Tranberg]

If you uninstall it, your "Stats" wont work anymore

[Rich Walker]

Yes you do lose the data. But My sales had dropped by 75% because people didn't wait for 18 secs for the home page to load.

[Joachim Tranberg]

Well. What about linking to your site, so we can check the loading time?

Have you tried to install web-optimizer?
http://code.google.com/p/web-optimizator/downloads/list

[mytheory.]

Hey Joachim,

What's that do? I didn't see one for PS, I guess we're supposed to use the WEBO Site SpeedUp v1.1.2? Have you used it, what's the results?

Thanks!

[Joachim Tranberg]

I use it on my website, and it lowers the loading time.

Yes use that version

[Frnz]

Hi Joachim, could you please tell us how to configure Web Optimizer in our Prestashop website?
I tried once but i got some error messages.

Thanks in advance !

Franz

[Joachim Tranberg]

Which errors?

[Frnz]

Hi Joachum, well, images and text changed their position.
A specific tutorial for prestashop users would be very useful. Many users have problems with slow loading pages.

Thanks in advance!

Franz

[rocky]

I've written a Performance Tips page here to help people speed up their sites.