Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

How To Speed Up Miva Website?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    How To Speed Up Miva Website?

    Any "best practice" type ideas on how to speed up a miva website? We use in-stock/out of stock messages so I don't think we can use the mods to create static pages. We have a lot of modules installed. Just wondering if there's any ideas beyond the basics of cleaning up the code.

    Thanks in advance,

    Chris C

    #2
    Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

    Who's your host? Hosting is the most important factor in Miva Merchant site speed.

    Comment


      #3
      Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

      Hi Chuck,

      We're w/ Hostasaurus

      Comment


        #4
        Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

        Well you can't beat them. They're who you should talk to, then - they know what can be done for each particular site they host.

        Comment


          #5
          Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

          Will do. They have been great over the years, I'll submit a ticket right now.

          Thanks Chuck

          Comment


            #6
            Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

            You still *could * use static pages with inventory messaging, albiet in a different way. If a customer adds an out of stock product from a static page, they will get a "sorry, that product is out of stock" screen. While not as good as showing it before hand, its still functions correctly.

            A lot of users of our static page generator, Optimizer, ONLY use it as a "gateway" page. once a customer adds a product to a basket, or touches any dynamic page, search, account, etc they remain in dynamic pages.

            This still has a lot of benefit to the customer and storeowner as this alone can reduce load by 50% to 80%. This is because on most sites, 50% to 80% of traffic is a single page request, and then an exit...refered to as a bail-out. (Hopefully, delivering that first page in a tenth or more of the time for a dynamic page would reduce some of the bail-out.)

            It should be possible to create a specific tool for inventory, that at least, checked inventory first, and if not available, used a popup message instead of a new page load. It coul be loaded in the back-ground so as to not effect the static page load. An interesting thought...but might be a while...its a busy time of year.
            Bruce Golub
            Phosphor Media - "Your Success is our Business"

            Improve Your Customer Service | Get MORE Customers | Edit CSS/Javascript/HTML Easily | Make Your Site Faster | Get Indexed by Google | Free Modules | Follow Us on Facebook
            phosphormedia.com

            Comment


              #7
              Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

              Something like the solution you mentioned below would be great. We've got a lot of custom products and we like to display the stock notifications because it gives a realistic expectation to the customer and helps them make their buying decision. Being able to bring these labels in some other way (maybe using ajax?) would allow for a much quicker page load utilizing the optimizer module.

              Thanks! Hope a solution is found somehow, sites using this mod are blazing fast.
              Last edited by cchobot; 11-27-09, 11:31 AM.

              Comment


                #8
                Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

                I am not sure that using Ajax would keep things fast - my experience has been that it tends to slow sites down, but it might be because that particular Ajax script was not implemented well.

                But either way, I think that the ajax call would still have to open a database connection...
                Last edited by Siamese-Dream.Com; 11-27-09, 01:22 PM.
                Mark Romero
                ~~~~~~~~

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

                  One of the biggest sources of slow-downs I have seen is sites who: 1. Have lots of categories, and 2. Use a module that shows an "open" category tree, where all categories are loaded into memory for every page (such as the cattree module from Sebenza with the "open" parameter).

                  It's not a problem with the module, it's just that lots of hierarchical data takes awhile to load, and doing it on every page can really slow down the site. If possible, stick to the default category tree, hardcode your cattree, or show only the top level of categories.
                  Susan Petracco
                  NetBlazon

                  1.866.400.2444

                  _____________________________________________

                  Like us on Facebook

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

                    Add to the list displaying a lot of products on every single category page. We have a few clients who keep displaying 200-500 products on a single CTGY page, and wonder why these pages take 10-15 seconds to load. Change the pagination to 20 and the page load drops to 1/10th of a second.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

                      Originally posted by Siamese-Dream.Com View Post
                      I am not sure that using Ajax would keep things fast - my experience has been that it tends to slow sites down, but it might be because that particular Ajax script was not implemented well.

                      But either way, I think that the ajax call would still have to open a database connection...
                      Of course it has to be done correctly in order for it to not imped performance, but the difference is loading it in the background so the its done while the customer is reading the page.

                      This is true for everything. I remember back in the days of OpenUI, folks would blame OpenUI for slowing things down, when in fact the actual load of OpenUI was minimal--although OpenUI had a slew of other issues<g>. What slowed down sites was the actual coding DONE with OpenUI. Same is true in MM5, either through SMT, or the "tool-ets" coding. Done right, they all add processing time...done wrong, the had huge amounts of processing time.

                      This also holds true for modules. And some modules more than others.
                      Last edited by Bruce - PhosphorMedia; 11-27-09, 03:28 PM.
                      Bruce Golub
                      Phosphor Media - "Your Success is our Business"

                      Improve Your Customer Service | Get MORE Customers | Edit CSS/Javascript/HTML Easily | Make Your Site Faster | Get Indexed by Google | Free Modules | Follow Us on Facebook
                      phosphormedia.com

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

                        Remik, that's a good point, and one that holds true even for static pages. That's a LOT of data to display, especially if you're showing product images for each one!
                        Susan Petracco
                        NetBlazon

                        1.866.400.2444

                        _____________________________________________

                        Like us on Facebook

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

                          hi there, Remik:

                          Change the pagination to 20 and the page load drops to 1/10th of a second.
                          I would have to ask your clients though, whether it might not be better to narrow down their categories so there is really only ten to 20 products per category.

                          I mean, as a shopper, it would be hard for me to look for something on a category page with 200 products.

                          I am sure the SEO benefits of having categories that were more narrowly focused would also be improved.
                          Mark Romero
                          ~~~~~~~~

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

                            Originally posted by Siamese-Dream.Com View Post
                            I would have to ask your clients though, whether it might not be better to narrow down their categories so there is really only ten to 20 products per category.

                            I mean, as a shopper, it would be hard for me to look for something on a category page with 200 products.

                            I am sure the SEO benefits of having categories that were more narrowly focused would also be improved.
                            I agree, to a point - it's a bit of a trade-off. Too many categories, whether flat or deep, can lead to an overwhelmed customer too.

                            SearchSpring has a nice feature where you can set up filters instead of managing categories, so that it becomes more dynamic for the customer. We use it on WonderBrains and a few client sites. On the toy store, for example, they can narrow by price, age, gender, brand, etc. An example is here: http://www.wonderbrains.com/art-supplies.html

                            Plus SearchSpring is pretty good at site search, too. ;)
                            Susan Petracco
                            NetBlazon

                            1.866.400.2444

                            _____________________________________________

                            Like us on Facebook

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: How To Speed Up Miva Website?

                              If it's page loading time improvements for your customers... (which really does relate to conversions, faster pages have less abandonment)

                              You also might want to look at a plugin for firefox called page speed, you have to have the firefox firebug add on and then google for "google page speed" which expands the firebug.

                              Also the firefox addin yslow can give you info. but in my experience firebug with google page speed helped me knock off about 50% of my page loading speed on the browser side of the equation by following their recommendations.

                              1. make sure you've compressed your images as much as you can (without losing quality of course). make sure you are using gif or jpeg as appropriate. they compress different types of images better than each other. Generally, cartoony or images with large areas of solid colors better with gif, photos with lots of varied neighboring pixels and colors are better handled as jpg.

                              2. if you can, make sure you have your image dimensions defined. If you've got your images at standardized sizes. This is easy. You may have already done it. What this does is reduce the amount of time it takes the browser to calculate the page dimensions so it can render it faster within the browser.

                              3. make sure you have image caching defined on your server in your htaccess files.

                              The seeming little tweaks they recommend really make a huge difference. page speed will show you how long each item within your page takes to load and the order they load in. You might be surpised.

                              Also do go after server side and miva merchant side speed improvements. See if you can reduce the number of modules you have in use on any one page. Especially if you are using toolkit or toolbelt. You might be able to get away with just one of them. Or maybe one of them can handle something you have a single module for.

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X