Website speed is a primary concern among e-commerce merchants, and a fast-loading website can have a significant effect to your bottom line. Fortunately you don’t need us to speed up your website, you just need to optimize your customizations.
First Things First: Understanding "First Load"
Our web module will take some time to complete loading the first time you open the webstore. This is because we have preloaded many of the application configuration variables that help improve your site's performance in the long run. These variables will be stored into memory after the first load, so the next time that you or a shopper access the web module again, the loading speed will be significantly faster.
The "first load" phenomenon may occur again if your webstore has been idle for a long time and someone accesses it again. Of course, this won’t be a problem in production unless your website rarely gets traffic. If that is the case, there are services you can subscribe to that can open your web pages from time to time.
Turn on caching when you’re ready to go live
Opening and retrieving data from a database is time and resource intensive, so in the Connected Business web module we give you the ability to "cache" the menu and website topic pages. Turning on the caching options is a fast and simple way to turbocharge your website.
Simply go to eCommerce module > Setup > Application Configuration to load the setting form.
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On the search bar, type these configuration options one at a time to load them:
- CacheEntityPageHTML
- CacheMenus
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Once you have loaded the application configurations settings and make sure that the Config Values are set to TRUE.
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Run your website against a web performance tool
There are a number of free website performance tools that you can use to pinpoint bottlenecks in your website. Here are three examples:
As you run the tools, here are a few issues to look out for:
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Is the size of your web pages too big? You may have designed a beautiful website, but if it has 5 MB of high resolution images on each page then the performance will suffer
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Do you have missing links and images? If your see a references to “t-error404.aspx” after the performance tool has ran, this means that you have links to files that do not exist. This can cause a real performance bottleneck, which you can easily fix by updating your code.
Hopefully, by using these methods you can speed up your website and optimize your code. If all else fails, we do offer services that can look into this for you. However it is not covered under our basic support plan as we do not support custom code or design.