If you want to start your own online business, you certainly need an online resource which will help you to trade your goods. For instance, you may try your hands with OpenCart. It’s an open-source content management system developed on PHP.
Using this CMS is quite beneficial. Firstly, it’s a free software: it means you won’t have to pay anything for it. It’s really ease to use it: you need to install OpenCart, choose an appropriate template and start earning money. Finally, it’s able to provide you with a great variety of tools such as an order management, multiple payment gateways, sales report and etc. to create an online store of your dream.
All in all, OpenCart is a nice CMS, but sometimes you need to do something to enhance its performance. Today, we’re going to speak about the necessity of speeding up OpenCart and will try to give you some clues on how to do it effectively.
Why do I Need to Speed Up My OpenCart
When you run an online store, you must be totally sure that your potential clients will get the best of the best from visiting your online store. It’s vital to do this because you have to persuade them to purchase goods exactly from you and not from somebody else. How can you do this? For instance, you may start with speeding up your online eCommerce resource.
The latest Internet researches show that speed really matters in case of online tradings: your potential clients will give you less than 5 seconds to let your page load. Secondly, Google also likes speed, and it won’t rank your site properly if it’s a slow one as this search engine really cares about online users.
Several Ways How You Can Do This
All in all, there are three main ways how you can actually speed up your OpenCart resource:
- Start with minifying/gzipping your JS, CSS or Jquery files. In general, it’s able to enhance your page speed up to 40-50% and reduce its request data loading size and time effectively;
- Initiate browser caching. It’s able to give you additional 5-15% of page speed points and improve your 2nd request onwards load time up to 40-50%;
- Optimize images. Cutting down your image sizes is able to speed up your page up to 5-15% and increase 20-30% of your request data loading file time and size.
How Can a CDN Ease Your Life?
Content Delivery Network or CDN is a network of servers scattered around the world and this service is really able to speed up your OpenCart resource. Here are some benefits of using a CDN for website:
- Your web page will be loaded faster as your files, images and scripts will be copied and placed on the servers located not far from your target users
- This service is able to reduce your sever’s load;
- You can save money on hosting;
- Your website will get better ranking;
- Your web resource will be protected from spammers, scrapers, and DDoS attacks.
Instructions how to integrate it with CDN you can find here – OpenCart CDN Integration.