Just a moment...

Monthly Archives: May 2014

Site Speed Jackpot – 500 eCommerce Sites Tested

500 eCommerce Sites Tested?
We came across an interesting post written by Ian Lurie, the Chairman and Principal Consultant at PI PORTENT.  Ian took the time to perform tests on 500 eCommerce sites.
What he discovered will open up your eyes to how much money you could be leaving on the table if you don’t pay attention to your performance metrics.

Opportunity
Like Ian, we preach about the benefits of having a faster site every day.  In fact, everywhere you look there are ads pitching the benefits of having a faster loading site.
It’s like you can’t get away from it, yet not many site owners / admins are doing anything about it.  What does that mean for you?  OPPORTUNITY.

What They Found

Over 50% of eCommerce sites tested had an average load time of 5+ seconds.

The biggest and easiest value jump is getting your site load time from 8 seconds down to 5 seconds as you will see in Ian’s graph.  The biggest revenue jump happens when you get your site to drop down to a 1 second load time from 2 seconds, but going from 8 to 5 seconds is easier and generates an 18% value/page view increase.

Software Adjustments
If you’re into the development side of maintaining your website, Ian goes into much more detail on minifying code, javascript timing, ETags, expired headers and image compression.  It will be worth your time to check out his post.

 Hardware Adjustments
We have performed a series of our own case studies and want to leave you with 6 observations:

1. Most developers / site owners realize that they can increase revenue by simply speeding up their page load times.

2. They run a series of speed tests through Google Insights or Webpagespeedtest and gather data.

3. They obtain detailed reports that show them how they can improve their page load times.

4. They focus their attention very heavily on coding / design while sometimes overlooking the performance of their server.

5. Those that understand their server plays a significant role in site speed start researching hosting platforms.

6. But they are hesitant to make a change with their hosting platform because they believe it is a monumental task, or they just don’t know who to trust.

Easy & Painless Solution
We took all of these variables into consideration while searching for an easy solution to take away the pain, so we created a live Magento hosting comparison tool. We have given these concerned individuals the opportunity to compare their current Magento site to a live mirror copy of itself on an optimized platform for free, just to take the fear factor away and show them what can happen when they get a tailored hosting plan that complements their specific site.

 

Let Your Magento Site Take A Free Test Drive (A Really Fast One)

Recently eBoundHost introduced a new Magento performance testing tool that allows you to compare your Magento site to a live mirror copy of itself  on the FASTEST SSD optimized platform available.  Here is an example of a recent comparison test that was performed for DivineOptics.com.  As you will see, this Magento site loaded up 2.2X faster on our optimized platform.

DivineOptics Side-By-Side Results

To take a free 7 day test drive with your Magento site, use this link:
http://magento1.eboundhost.com/magento-performance-comparison/

Be careful, don’t drive too fast.

magentocar4

Magento Site Speed Case Study & Success Story – YunesSwathe.com

YunesSwathe.com is an example of a website that was hosted on a Non-Magento Optimized Platform.  The slow speed concern was brought to our attention via the Speed Test Request form on our website.  YunesSwathe.com was brought back on the right track after going through a hosting transformation.  Let’s take a detailed walk-through to understand what was done to optimize this Magento site for speed.

STEP 1 – WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DIAGNOSIS
The site was running at a slower speed from a general perspective and we knew that some further scope for speed improvement was left open for us based on our technical perspective.  The site was diagnosed and analyzed to find out the limiting factors which were slowing down the websites performance.

Lets look at the speed report prior to the migration to the eBoundHost Magento Optimized Cloud Platform:

First Byte Time – F
Keep-alive enabled – A
Compress Transfer – A
Compress Images – D
Progressive JPEGs -F
Cache static content -A
Effective use of CDN – X

As we can see here, this is a standard shared hosting server that is set up to cater to most php/mysql CMS (i.e. WordPress, Drupal, Magento, etc…) Kudos for setting keep alive to enabled and caching static content.  Of course it’s not enough to get the demanding Magento platform to load at a reasonable speed. That’s why we see a horrendous  2300ms TTFB here.

STEP 2 – TRANSFER WEBSITE TO MAGENTO OPTIMIZED PLATFORM
Through assisted migration, Yunesswathe.com was moved from a standard web-hosting platform to our Magento Optimized Cloud platform.

STEP 3 – LAUNCHING ON A PRE-CONFIGURED PLATFORM
Once website functionality and performance were carefully verified, A records were pointed and the site seamlessly switched over.  A new beginning for Yunesswathe.com.

RESULTS:
Let’s look at the new report after migration:


FACTOR                          BEFORE CHANGE
          AFTER CHANGE            RESULT
First Byte Time                                F                                             A      GREATLY Improved
Keep-alive enabled                          A                                             A                              Neutral
Compress Transfer                          A                                             A                              Neutral
Compress Images                            D                                             F                           Needs Work
Progressive JPEGs                          F                                              F                              Neutral
Cache static content                        A                                              A                              Neutral
Effective use of CDN                       X                                              X                              Neutral

We have achieved substantial improvement in time to 1st byte and page load times.  CDN was not chosen by YunesSwathe.com’s Admin for this particular situation due to the geographical location of their target market.  Now the next step was to make sure that the developers for YunesSwathe.com were aware that they have the option to optimize their images for better performance.

Screen Shot 2014-04-18 at 4.22.37 PM


CONCLUSION

Optimizing this case study website was not as easy as it looks like from the report above.
eBoundHost has done some super-tweaking to achieve high speed performance levels.

Using a Magento Optimized host like eBoundHost offers much more configuration and tweaking  flexibility to gain more speed on any Magento site.

YunesSwathe.com got their website page time to 1st byte reduced from 2.229s to 0.161s, which is almost 14 times faster.  The fully loaded website time was also reduced by 57% from: 10.298s to 4.448s.

WEBSITE SPEED OPTIMIZATION CASE STUDY DETAILS
Website                                                               – YunesSwathe.com
Original Web Host Server                               – Undisclosed For Privacy
Magento Optimized Host                                – eBoundHost
Site Speed Optimizer                                       – Jerry T.
Editor & Magento Success Manager              – Tom P.




Just a moment...
Just a moment...