Optimizing Site

[brikat]

I've got my site ready to go (mostly) but still need to add a lot of products....just wanted to get it all working properly first. But my main page is really large and I'm not sure why. I've optimized my images and installed image handler but it hasn't helped much.

I combined categories which took several of my product photos/categories off the front page thinking that might help but it only brought the size down by 10-15000 bytes. I'd really like to be able to use featured products and add more categories without taking my main page over 100,000 bytes. Can anyone help me figure out what's causing the page to be so large?

I am a novice at this and have been plugging away at trying to learn to design this site and use zen-cart for 3 months as I know very little about web design. So if anyone could point me in the right direction I'd be so grateful. Looking at the speed via websiteoptimization.com it mentions I'm using 4 stylesheets. Not sure if that is part of the problem. Most of my stylesheet is in custom_template.

Thanks so much for any guidance.

Lisa
multiple-expressions.com

[Merlinpa1969]

I didnt look at the size but its loading just fine ( as it is right now )

[brikat]

Thanks. I've just seen so many posts about needing to be around 30000 bytes for quick load time and not sure that's possible with Zen-Cart but I've seen many around 50,000 with lots of cateogry pics and featured products on the front page. Just wondering how they do it. There's no way I can do that without going way over 100,000 and slowing my site way down.

Lisa

[Merlinpa1969]

the server that its on has alot to do with that s well,

[Zinfandel]

Lisa,

Why is your home page SSL protected?

[brikat]

Hmmm. I didn't know it was. Guess I've got something else to figure out now:)

Lisa

[brikat]

Zinfandel,

The hosting company helped me transfer the SSL certificate from GoDaddy. I'm assuming this problem comes from something they did rather than anything I did or is there something I can do to fix this?

Lisa

[Kim]

Taking a peek at your source, shows you have a bunch of links and images in your header that are being called through HTTPS. I am assuming that this is so there are not errors thrown during login or checkout, however this may be part of the problem with speed.

The background images really should be called using relative addresses through the CSS instead of being hardcoded with absolute addresses. The same rule of relative vs absolute URLs for the links will allow them to work better too.

[brikat]

Agh, yes you are right. Thank you! I haven't liked how they have been loading and now I know why. But I'm not sure I know how to call them up through the CSS. I know how to do it with a background image for a side box or entire page background but my header is made up of more than one image. How do I define that in the stylesheet? Any chance you could give me a clue on where to start changing links/images over to the CSS?

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond to this post. Now I've got some ideas on what to work on to get the site to load faster.

Lisa

[brikat]

And yes, I had to change the links to https to keep the errors from coming up questioning the security of the site.