E-Commerce Website Running Extremely Slowly

  • Hi there,

    I’m currently running an e-commerce website which displays around 700-900 products, however we don’t particularly get a lot of traffic, maybe around 5,000 visitors a month (maybe less). We have been trying to optimize the site for quite some time now by doing various tests of GTMetrix and following guidelines to optimize different elements of the site like using W3 Total Cache, Removing Query Strings, Optimizing images before uploading etc. We’re currently getting a B PageSpeed score and a B YSlow rating, which isn’t too bad on GTMetrix, however the site is taking a massive 10 seconds+ to load all of the time and we just can’t work out why.

    We’re currently on an older shared hosting package, which we’ve been considering upgrading as maybe this is slowing the site down. However, we need to know what kind of package to change over to if that is the case. The other thing it could be is the theme we’re using which is called Boemia, we’re getting a lot of bad website test results regarding Minifying JS and CSS and also making fewer HTTP requests, however my theme developers seem confident it isn’t their theme.

    Please feel free to take a look at the site yourself as we can’t work out why the site is running as slow as it has been – https://www.ribbonsdirect.co.uk

    Looking at our Google Analytics today, of the 658 users of our site in the last few weeks, a massive 419 of them have left the site before 10 seconds meaning people are getting fed up with waiting for the site to load up.

    I hope you guys can offer some good advice as we’re really stumped on what to do next, thank you in advance.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Try installing Query Monitor and see if there are any slow queries.

    Thread Starter plasticcards

    (@plasticcards)

    Haven’t used the plugin before, but just installed it and it doesn’t seem like anything is slowing the site down dramatically. The total time came to 0.0270 seconds so I’d imagine none of those elements are the sole reason the site is running slowly. Let me know if I should be looking at anything else on that plugin.

    In that case it’s going to require a developer to review your site and to find the bottleneck. It’s most likely your ecommerce plugin, but to find the cause will require tracing the latency to the source. Hit up Elance and start a fixed price project asking for bids to optimize your site. Sorry wish I could give you an easy solution.

    Thread Starter plasticcards

    (@plasticcards)

    Do you not think changing from shared hosting to a better package like a VPS or even dedicated hosting would improve the speed a lot?

    If it was a database issue, probably. Since it’s not, it’s unlikely simply switching hosts will result in a huge improvement.

    However it never hurts to try. Grab a VPS for a month, install your site and see how it performs. If it’s still slow, delete the VPS and go to my recommendation above.

    By the way, if you do create the project on elance make sure that you state that average page loads must be less than 2 seconds. Don’t give them an abstract, “I want a faster website” goal.

    Thread Starter plasticcards

    (@plasticcards)

    Ok thanks for your advice, I’m going to try a VPS or an Optimized WordPress hosting package with HostGator and see if the site runs and quicker on there. We do have a lot of products on the site and quite a large database, this is what was making me think it could be that but if the site doesn’t run any quicker on there then I’ll have a look into Elance, I was hoping I’d get some advice to try out on here so if anybody has any useful advice, that would be appreciated.

    Thread Starter plasticcards

    (@plasticcards)

    I have just done a test on Pingdom and we received the following results-

    Performance Grade = 74/100
    Requests = 140
    Load Time = 23.37 seconds (Slower than 93% of websites tested)
    Page Size = 2.1mb

    We received scores of 0 in the following areas-

    – Combine external JavaScript
    – Parallelize downloads across hostnames

    I also noticed that on the Page Analysis page there was 1 failed connection.

    Does anybody have any ideas why this is occurring, we’re going to try changing hosts soon to a different platform but I still don’t think that would improve the site speed dramatically. Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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