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How to try and make your website faster when you are using oscommerce as your shopping cart.

Two weeks ago I had too much time on my hands and just one small mention by one of my customers that the site was extremely slow on her end to force me again to see if there was any way I could speed up the site. I must mention that this dear client is from Harare and I honestly do not know how technologically advanced Harare-Zimbabwe is these days after all the things they have been through.

I read extensively and landed up on several websites that had some good advice. At the same time I did a search on my site on the internet and found a site that rates your website and that also gives you specifications on the site. It rated us as 1 170 000 most visited site worldwide and 7376 in South Africa. But the things that concerned me was the fact that 93% of all websites were faster than mine.

So I took up the huge task of speeding up my website. This is easier said than done because our website uses the Oscommerce shopping cart. 

The Oscommerce basic website is one large blank canvas that can be changed to a myriad different forms once loaded. It is completely free. Anybody can download an Oscommerce site and start using it. Oscommerce runs on PHP. This is an interactive language that allows you to do ecommerce or sales on an online website. This language is written in code and it is rather difficult to understand. I taught myself PHP and can now help myself but it took a couple of years for an old Toppie like me to learn something new.

Oscommerce allows each user to start a session when they get on the website. This means that it kind of remembers what you have done. You can thus enter goodies into the shopping cart and proceed to another page where you can then send this detail to the shop owner who can then dispatch your goods to you. The other nifty thing about Oscommerce is that it will allow you to log in and create a more permanent shopping cart. You can enter an item in your cart and come back next week and the same item will still be there. This is one of the things that really drew me to Oscommerce because this allows you to create a type of wishing list of the items you might want to buy up ahead.

Every time you do a query Oscommerce must run through the whole database to recover the detail requested. If your database is large like ours you satrt to get a bit of drag. We now have 9000 images and 3700 active items. But there are currently over 7500 items in the database. This is a lot. The worst offenders that creates slow speeds are specials in oscommerce. You will notice that we do not have any items under the specials tab. This is because it makes your site slow. So what I do now, I just mark off the items that I am selling as a special and sometimes I will make mention of it in the description.

To speed up the site you use a process called caching. It will create a cookie that remembers the essential detail of every page that you have visited. You will notice that some pages may be slow at first but when you visit them again they become lightning fast. We also reduce the size of the pictures. This makes them a bit small but they do load faster.

Here are the problems you might run into when using Oscommerce. Oscommerce has over 6000 add-ons. These are changes that you can make to the blank canvas. This is like leaving a kid in a candy store. At first every change you make changes the 'canvas' but then you discover that they can really make your site slow. Why is speed such an issue. If you wait longer than 4 seconds for a page to load you loose interest. Do you agree with me?

Something that looks harmless might mess up your site terribly. I tried a paid add-on just two weeks ago that gave me some serious headaches. This one claimed that it will reduce a 6 second site to only a fraction of a second. I struggled with the instalment and when I had it installed I discovered that it would just log you into any somebody else's profile. Caryl had a good laugh about it. The only good thing that came out of this is the Ioncube application that I loaded in the root folder. This application helps to decipher PHP and make it more readable for different browsers. I have measured the site before and after and found that it is almost twice as fast now as before.

I removed banners and trackers off my site. This reduced the queries considerably. I still have around 3000 images on my site that is not used. I am trying to clean this up and it is not so easy. I removed some images just to find out that I actually do need them in the end. If you discover an item without a photo please send us an email about it. We will endeavour to fix it as soon as possible.

If you want to design a Oscommerce website I would love to help you set it up. 

I will give you some tips on how to get on the map after you have set up your site.