Anyone notice the size of the pages with the stock templates, even at pages where there is no product images (around 85000 bytes)? I’m worried about dial-up customers as the pages are 4 times as heavy as what I’m use to. 20 second page loading on a conservative page with a 56k modem will not be good. Anyone have any ideas how to cut the weight down? Compress css and java, get rid of modules etc.? I love this program but this makes me nervous.
Part of the problem is thumbnail image sizes, cs 1.3.2, uses browser height, width to make them visually smaller, but they are still the same filesize as the product image.
In 1.3.3, GD/Imagemajic will be used to generate real thumbnails and lower the file size accordingly.
that will help for sure.
The CS-Cart support team wrote for those interested.
You may turn off the JavaScript menu for the category items on the left to reduce the total page weight.
To do that you need to go to the Administration->Settings->Appearance page. Then find ‘Categories menu style’ setting there and change it from Emenu to Dynamic or Plain.
This will disable the JavaScript menu and drop throw about 30kb off.
You may also wish to add a gzip flag to compress pages and make them load quicker.
Now I am of course saying this with blind eyes to what is currently used for the platform, but…
With other platforms and heavy pages, I have used expressions such as:
php_flag zlib.output_compression On and place that in the htaccess file. this will allow the pages to be compressed and load much faster on browsers.
Now there are also other settings that can be applied depending on how your host has things set up. If you do not see a faster loading of pages in a short pariod of time, then there may need to be changes made in the php.ini file, or other attributes added to the htaccess file to speed things up, but it can be sped up none the less.