Site Speed

[krittleb]

A couple of questions.

First, are AC sites fast and easy to load only if shoppers are using high-speed internet? We have had a large number of complaints on the speed of our site recently and when checking the site ourselves, it is working quite fast. Our host server also says it is working quickly and there are not any issues. Is there something that can be done to greatly speed the page loads?

Also, we have noticed that when the site does occasionally drag a little, it gets exponentially worse the more items that are added to the cart. I think I heard somewhere that the shopping cart is not well-optimized in AC for speed. Many of our customers can have over 50+ items in the cart at a time and almost all will have at least 15, so we really need to know if there is a way to optimize the shopping basket so it doesn't bog down the site.

Then, I had a couple other questions regarding the site in a different post that never got responded to. Is there a way to change the cookie settings so that the shopping cart will never flush, even for anonymous users? Also, some customers have had problems where they create an order, log-in to check-out, and when they log-in, their cart disappears. Any suggestions on this??

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello Kristi,

AbleCommerce is well written and optimized for heavy load. Your website is quite fast when browsing the pages. However I'm seeing a major issue when adding items to the cart. This isn't normal behavior and I'd have your developer double check the customizations, especially the mini-basket in the header.

[jmestep]

Krisit,
Also check how many tax rules you have. Many of them can slow the basket down considerably. We had a site with 600 rules and they had to turn them off to get add to basket speed back up. I believe Able is working on that issue.

[krittleb]

I checked the tax rules and we only have one, so shouldn't be an issue!

I will let my developer know that it may be something he needs to fix with the mini-basket in the navigation header.

Thanks for your help!