Improving X-Cart Speed Performance – 1 of 3

There are many reasons to improve the performance of your X-Cart eCommerce Store, the primary reason of course is to make sure that your visitors aren’t hanging around waiting for pages to load.  Studies show that the visitors patience is getting shorter and shorter, especially as the new generation never had to live with dial up speeds.

In addition, some search engines like Google will even soon begin using the speed of your site as a ranking factor.  More than likely this chain of events is because visitors are loosing patience for slow sites, and Google wants to please its visitors.

So in this post I’m going to go over a few general speed improvements for X-Cart.  I’ll go into more depth in later posts.

The Basics to Speeding up Your X-Cart

1. Do NOT use Fancy Categories – This is something that QualiTeam released for X-Cart as a mod to add additional features to the category display in X-Cart.  Unfortunately, it was done pretty poorly.  In order to make it possible to produce a lot of different abilities they use a lot of Smarty math statements, it makes the mod very resource intensive.  A good developer should be able to produce most of the display options manually without needing the universal mod.
2. Turn off Advanced Statistics – This is essentially analytics for your website.  You can quickly end up with millions of rows in your database.  The more rows in your database the slower searches in your database become.  You can easily replace this with Google Analytics and it’s Commerce Tracking.  Not only will it speed up your website, but you’ll get better analytics for your site from Google anyway.
3. Put images in the file system – This isn’t a big item, when installing X-Cart it’s the default option so it’s probably already done this way for you.  But it’s still worth checking.  The more data that is in the database the slower it becomes.
4. Limit Featured Items on your home page – The first page your visitor sees on a direct website visit is your home page, and it’s proven that the further down the page someone has to scroll to see something the less likely it is to be seen. So cut back on those Featured Items, using 20, 30 or even more is not going to provide very much benefit if seen at all, but it will increase the database queries, and it will slow down the load time on your home page.
5. Optimize your database regularly – Remember in the old days of FAT file systems before NTFS existed?  Your hard drive would become fragmented from files being deleted and created.  While “defraging” your hard drive is no longer a hot topic, your database for your website still has this issue.  You want to optimize the database regularly to essentially sort the data and put information in order so that it can be accessed faster.  On the average site you probably only need to do this monthly, but as your site gets more traffic you’ll want to consider doing this weekly.
6. Ensure you have plenty of RAM or Memory – If you are on a shared hosting account you probably don’t have this option, and that might be okay on a development site or a very new site without much traffic.  Start building some traffic and you’ll quickly find that shared hosting isn’t going to cut it for a dynamic eCommerce website.  When you are on some form of Virtual hosting you will want to make sure you have plenty of Memory.  Your performance can decrease, your CPU usage will increase if you don’t have the memory to sustain your website.  Not to mention having extra memory will come in very handy on some of the later performance improvements.

That’s enough for you to get started.  If you’ve missed any of these basic elements in the past you should notice a significant speed improvement immediately.  If you are using an X-Cart Recommended Host they should be able to help you with these items.

In my next post I’ll cover some Intermediate level improvements that will further increase and optimize the performance of your X-Cart installation.