Speed of Yireo site
Friday, 02 April 2010Last month we have been working on to get the Yireo site up to speed: Now that extensions like MageBridge gain interest, the number of visitors we have to deal with also increases. But our default server-settings were not tuned, and our template was not optimized for speed. So we started with tuning our site: The best thing is we documented everything and are now putting it online. You can benefit as well from this!
Meet SPO
Many know the term SEO, but few actually do something with the hint that a better performance increases popularity of your site. For us, increasing performance is vital to make Yireo more successful: Our tutorials provide a wealth of information, but if these pages are loading slow there's not much joy in browsing our site.
All the steps we took to increase our site will be documented in the upcoming months (and for some steps, the documentation is already there). This process is something we call SPO, Site Performance Optimization, and when used properly it's one of the best methods to increase your pagerankings.
Light-weight Magento
Magento, our favourite e-commerce platform, has been blamed for being slow. So it was time to prove the opposite: We have tuned both our Joomla! site and our Magento site, and thanks to this the shop (integrated in Joomla! using Magento) performs fast and efficient. It's not a simple task and it requires effort. But in the end it's definetely worth it.
It also shows again that Magento is flexible enough to deal with these things. CSS-files can be compressed to limit the number of HTTP-requests, with caching enabled and caching directories optimized the PHP-code is executed faster, with image compression and techniques like gzip and mod_deflate the bandwidth is minimized. Even a complex thing like a CDN is easy to implement: Just change the media-path in your Magento Admin Panel and you're done.
Checkout our Magento SPO listing for a kickstart.