I installed that addon a while ago, and got a speed index of 80/100. Sounds good to me, but the list of suggested changes is staggering! I did contact customer support, but all I got as a response was that I should contact their custom development service.
PageSpeed suggested the following tasks, and I wonder if any of you tried to do these things :
No body is perfect, and the addon is not perfect as well. That’s my answer. Try to run the test on a Joomla or Wordpress site. You will get similar values. Do you think the code of CS-Cart, Wordpress etc. is bad? There are things which can’t be changed and the addon is not the measure.
True, I agree. But, there is a potential gain about for example combining so many CSS files to less, besides the obvious tasks like using properly compressed pictures and defining their sizes.
I’m not saying these sites you mentioned are bad or even not good, I’m just trying to speed the whole thing up and there are always things one could do.
You can take the codes of the css files and put it into just one css file, then you will have to alter the template files. But I think it’s not a good idea.
You mean because I loose the built in distinction of which CSS governs which part? Or mess up each update (that for sure)?
Even though the CSS files are small, I’m sure there is a speed gain in combining them. I generally like to tweak things that come out of the box.
And, while doing this, I can add my CSS switching I’m thinking about as well - [url]http://forum.cs-cart.com/showthread.php?t=22216[/url]
Remember, that when you “combine” you are setting yourself up for maintenance nightmare at upgrade time.
Personally, I’d rather my customers see a 200ms hit on the first page load for getting css and javascript and not have an upgrade nightmare when it’s time to upgrade.
Also try to remember that the makers of these tools do so to generate custom development (like you got from customer service). Hence, any thing they find that is not “perfect” for pure performance reasons will be reported so you can pay them to fix it. Unfortunately, many of these things will not make a noticable difference.
There are lots of factors in performance including server load, network route (hops) between client and server, etc. The biggest gain you will get is from compressing the output (gzip or other common methods). This should be done at the Apache level, not the PHP level so that headers and all info are compressed, not just pages that come out of php.