14 Seconds load is terrible. Can you give us a link to your site. Can you share the hosting plan you use ? Also, can you test with the default opencart theme enabled to see if it makes difference ?

Regards,
ThemeBurn team

Hi Guys!

Thanks for your reply

Actually it is weird, now it is down to 7 secs check the image.
The Checkout part is the one that takes most of the time. Im using one page checkout by bingo extension.

The picture shows your repeat ageload can go down from +4 sec to 1 sec of less if you correctly setup caching of static objects, esp. images and css.

TFB – needs hardware tweaking or change. That could shave off about +2 sec of you first page load.

@kaliyas, we looked at your site and we didn’t observe any slowness in the response. You have very few categories and products, so there is no reason your site should load slow. We have tested Shoppica with thousands of categories and products and it serves the site contents under 1 second on a shared account.

Your hosting plan is one of the cheapest among the shared hosting, so you shouldn’t expect excellent performance. Your site is hosted on the same machine with several hundreds sites. Usually the performance of these hosting plans vary in accordance with how much requests are made to the hosted sites. In general, you should be able to run your site on a shared plan, but it seems your current hosting provider is not the best choice.

A VPS more than enough for the type of site you have and you could find ones under $20 per month. We heard good things about hostgator and jaguarpc, but you better ask (or search) in webhostingtalk.com

I am wondering how do you measure the load time. There are two types of loading – page generation time (the time it takes the server to process the page code) and browser loading time (the time it takes the browser to get the server response and to deliver it to the user). The server’s hardware is responsible for the page generation time and the network bandwidth for the delivery time.

Here’s how to test page generation time:

1. open /index.php

2. put these lines in the beginning, immediately after the opening <?php tag:

$starttime = explode(' ', microtime());
$starttime = $starttime[1] + $starttime[0];

3. Go to the end of the file and replace $response->output(); with:

ob_start();

// Output
$response->output();

$contents = ob_get_contents();

$mtime = explode(' ', microtime());
$totaltime = $mtime[0] + $mtime[1] - $starttime;

ob_end_clean();

if (false !== strstr($contents, '</body>')) {
    echo str_replace('</body>', sprintf("\n<br /><br /><small class=\"small\">Page generation time: %.5f seconds</small>\n</body>", $totaltime), $contents);
} else{
    echo $contents;
}

You should observe the page generation time at the very bottom of every page on the site. This change doesn’t hurt the performance or google ranking, so you can leave it safely for now.

Let us know when you’re done.

The page delivery time is usually measured from the ‘Net’ panel of firebug or other similar tools.

@Sarabjit – Thank you for your advices. We want to note however, that having a hosting plan with memcached or varnish doesn’t improve the performance out of the box. Opencart should be configured to take advantage of these technologies. We thing also that a decent VPS is a good choice for 98% of the existing opencart stores.

Regards,
ThemeBurn team

@kaliyas

We use this and are very happy.

http://www.indichosts.net/semi-dedicated

Welcome to bliss!