I will post this "email" I just sent to a person who saw my website www.historichomehardware.com in the ZenCart Showcase, and asked why my site loads so fast compared to many other sites on the Showcase. Maybe this info will help others (figured I spent 30 minutes explaining so might as well share it with the rest of the ZenCart Forum). This was the question:

I visited your web site from www.zencart.com 's showcase by following URL.
http://www.historichomehardware.com/

I found it is very fast than other zencart case. why your web site is so fast? would you like to tell me the skills of optimize zencart? thank you very much!

Answer was:
Hi Leon, I am the person who designed my Mother's Zencart site (I am her son living in Germany).

I can tell you two of the biggest things to speed up a site.

1. Make sure you have a good Hosting Company / ISP (Internet Service Provider) and your SQL Database is on a fast server. If you have it on one that has a ton of other sites that are constantly doing big downloads and uploads, it will make your site soooooooo slow because you also need to exchange info back and forth with the database (because ZenCart is PHP, and PHP is dynamic).

2. The next big tip I can give you is to integrate the Image Handler 2.0 Modification (http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?ma...roducts_id=117) into you ZenCart system. Image Handler automatically resizes your images (and the kb size) to the three normal sizes used: i.e small, medium and large.

I will give you an example. Without the IH (short for Image Handler), you normally just upload an image (or images) of your product when you add a new product. You usually load the "largest" image (say a 600x600 image and it is 100 kb in data size). You set in your Zencart ADMIN "Image setting" how large you want it to show in List View, Product View, and "click for full size" blown up image. Say you set the list view to 50x50 pixel, the product view to 300x300, and of course the full blown view to 600x600. You would THINK that the 50x50 picture is smaller in kb size but it is NOT with ZenCart. To view that little image, the ZenCart system needs to download the entire FULL size image (it's the only one it has access to). Make a test and right click on the small image in List View and select "view properties". You will see that little image is somehow 100 kb!! Now imagine you have your List View settings at 30 items per page. That is 3 MB of images alone with the rest of the PHP text that needs to be loaded! Might take a bit to load, right?

Perfect example: I clicked on three sites in the Showcase. The first two were good. The third: http://www.joshuacripps.com/zencart/store/ you will see it takes a bit of time for all the images to load. Right mouse click on one of the "thumbnails" and you will see it was 101 Kb!! For a 53x80 Pixel picture!!

Or great guys at ZenCart say this will be addressed in probably the 2.0 version, but for now you can also use the ZenCart function of loading *_MED, *_LRG images which require you to edit each of your images twice from the original and then check that you save them in the right folders, etc. The IH does it all in one shot. Best Mod I have seen for this system.

Hope this info helps.


Bob Harris
US Auto Parts & Supply Company
Ritter-Von-Hellberg Str. 27
91575 Windsbach, Germany
Tel (in Germany) 09871-656407 - Fax 09871-656409
Tel (from USA) 011-49-9871-656407 - Fax 011-49-9871-656409
For ordering, shipping, and payment info, go to: www.usap.de