I run a graphic intensive website (jewelry) and I want to speed up the category pages.
In the thumbnail settings, I see an option for Thumbnail format. How should I use this and will it speed things up? All my images are jpegs, if I set this to GIF, will this convert them causing faster loading speeds?
I’d also be interested in any other suggestions to speed things up.
Thank you!
Also, what should the standard category page load time be with about 20 items (thumbnails at 120px at 80%) be? Many of my pages are taking around 8-9 seconds, I fear this is too long.
Me again 
. Can someone also explain the speed differences of the “Image Location,” database and file system. Is there really a big difference or is it really not noticable? I kind of like the database security of my images, but I also want speed. Ah, what to do?!
Answer to question Number 1:
Generally, no. .jpg is usually less KB for the same image, thus loading faster. You want to try and keep each image the smallest KB you can through .jpg compression without slighting quality
Number 2
If your total page is taking 8-9 seconds to load on cable/dsl, you are correct, that is unacceptable. Your images are either too large (KB) or you need a good host.
Number 3
It is the consensus that the file system is much faster than the database system for image storage and rendering. If you have a decent server host, security is not an issue.
[quote name=‘MikeFold’]Answer to question Number 1:
Generally, no. .jpg is usually less KB for the same image, thus loading faster. You want to try and keep each image the smallest KB you can through .jpg compression without slighting quality[/QUOTE]This is very true for photographs … .gif can be a lot faster if your image consist of simple graphics with very little dithering or gradiant transitions from color to color. Most product thumbnails will be better served by .jpg as Mike suggests though, depends on your product.
You can change the ‘quality’ of the .jpg to a lower compression > smaller file size in the thumbnail settings. I think default is 80, most of my thumbnails work ok for me with lower compression rates … somewhere in the 60 range, though the thumbnails I do in photoshop for my current non-cs site are compressed even lower than that. You just have to determine how low is acceptable.
I agree 8-9 secs is way too high. I agree with Mike on points 2 & 3. Your best bet may be to move to a more robust server / host that is set up for serving dynamic sites. Most budget hosting plans aren’t robust enough.
Hi Guys,
Thank you for your suggestions. My current host is HostingMatters, which is supposed to be pretty good. On my computer (w/cable) my pages takes about 3-4seconds (maybe because their cached) but in the CS cart it says the speed of most of my pages are in the 7-9 second area.
I messed around with just about every setting I possibly could. I did learn that my Jpegs were actually two times smaller than when I had the cart convert them to GIFs. So, I left them as jpegs although I do not see a speed difference. Also, I tried the File System and the Database, but did not see a speed difference.
My CS cart site does not seem much slower than my current ecommerce still on my main domain. Hopefully, my speed issues are only in my head because the CS cart “speed” section shows high load times.
Maybe you can take a look at my “TEST” categories (6 of them) and tell me if they seem slow to you? This site is still under construction.
[url]Loading...
Thank you again for any further suggestions.
Btw, most of those thumnails on the page above are 120 pixels using the 80% quality setting are 6-7000k. Are they too large still?
I was wondering what operating system you have your site on? Right now I have several different sites but seem to be only having the “slow” issues on the site that is hosted on a Windows server. I am beginning to wonder if there are issues with a host that uses WIndows.
I do know that shared hosting can have issues, but I have 4 different carts and all of them reside on “shared” hosting. Only the Windows seems to have more problems.
Thanks,
Clips
Its on Windows.
[quote name=‘joshin’]Its on Windows.[/QUOTE]
Although they probably added the following quote to their site after you purchased your version of CS-Cart, here is what the site says now at…
[url]https://www.cs-cart.com/requirements.html[/url]
[quote]
CS-Cart runs on most server specific configurations ranging from dedicated servers to shared servers that utilize different PHP configurations such as register_globals. Although the software works well on Windows and Unix-like operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, RedHat), we strongly recommend installing CS-Cart on Linux, FreeBSD or RedHat ones. The main reasons for our recommendation are the stable work of CS-Cart on a Unix-like operating system (it is more secure and allows more flexible control of file and directory permissions, etc.) and other performance advantages.
[/quote]
After a long, 2 month battle with “trying” to get the CS-Cart shopping cart to have decent speed on a Windows server we have given up. We are now getting ready to move everything to a Linux server. As now noted by CS on their website and noted above, “…we strongly recommend installing CS-Cart on Linux, FreeBSD or RedHat…”. While it would have been nice if they would have stated this before, I am glad they are letting people know now…before they buy.
Thanks,
Clips
[quote name=‘joshin’]
Maybe you can take a look at my “TEST” categories (6 of them) and tell me if they seem slow to you? This site is still under construction.
[/QUOTE]
around 12 sec