New here and wanted to see if anyone might have some insight into what is going on with my site/page. My sales are very consistant on my site and then I have days where there are just no sales at all and no dropped carts, etc… despite the same amount of traffic. Talking going from three days of $800-$1000 in sales and then the next day nothing. When I check the nothing days, there seems to be major page load issues. 7 seconds, 8 seconds, 10 seconds, 20 seconds on various product pages. My shopping cart (3dcart), refuses to take any responsibility to what might be going on. I do a lot of analysis and I have come to the conclusion that images needs to be optimized better, but also there may be issues with the code from my cart, the css, scripts, etc… Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Hi Rachel,
Sure… you have optimisation possibilities in the content.
But i’d be going over your Google analytics to see where people are dropping off…
Ie follow their footsteps and see exactly which page they leave on… tie that into searches or sources and see if you can identify failures in content.
I usually go through these optimization points with my site:
Do I need all this, or can I remove some of it?
Can I set up scripts etc. to be in the actual html (i.e. typing the script in )?
Then for images and videos:
3a. Can I use an optimization service to make images/videos take less time to load (I use imageoptimizer.net for images and clipchamp.com for videos. If you can, try cropping images and using services like picresize.com to make them smaller)?
…and for scripts and css:
3b. Can I minify them (get in touch if you need help)?
…and for HTML:
3c. Are them some unnecessary tags?
…and for all programming languages:
3d. Am I using deprecated functions/commands (they’re likely to be deprecated because they’ve been replaced with faster stuff)?
Also I noticed the favicon takes 9s because it could not find it! Make sure you have a favicon in the public_html root otherwise you’re in for a slow load.
Summary (TLDR): Your main problem is images and inexistent files, namely the favicon. For images, ask yourself the question: Can I use an optimization service e.g. imageoptimizer.net to make images take less time to load? For the favicon, make sure that you actually have one to stop slow load times.
One of the biggest bottle necks is the sheer number of resources your pages are loading - just merging them and removing excessive ones could probably save you 1-2 second load time easily.
Regarding the favicon.ico - this isn’t really that big of any issue since favicons are fetched after the page has loaded and finished rendering and are pretty much the “icing on the cake”. I would certainly do it, but there are more fruit lower down the tree to pluck first IMHO.
There are also a number of .asp files which are dynamically loading images - I would look at making them static image files rather than dynamic. They are certainly fast loading now, but when your server gets hit by adnormally large waves of traffic, those extra resource intensive tasks will come to a screeching halt - although this is less of an issue at the moment.
If you want any more information, or a quote, please don’t hesitate to ask!
What you’re describing may or may not relate to data WPT can produce.
I’d say your best action is have a Server Savant go through your Apache logs + determine what exactly is happening during normal operation + $0 sale operation time slices.
One of my hosting clients came to me because of a similar situation.
What I found was during $0 sale time slices, a High Value Attack was being leveled against the site in question. They were attempting to use mod_bandwidth + mod_evasive to deal with this situation, which only aggravated the problem.
The fix was to…
tune Apache + MariaDB (MySQL) + PHP so site could continue serving content to all traffic - real + attack - long enough for fail2ban to recognize the attack
then have fail2ban block attackers at the kernel/iptables level
Daily cashflow leveled out after that + no more $0 income slices occurred again.
If you require assistance analyzing your logs, PM me.
Without catching it in a bad state it is hard to say for sure where the performance problems are. If the product pages are incredibly slow then it may not be the shopping cart provider depending on how they are integrated.
If you can run a bunch of tests when you see it slow and share those results it will help identify where the problem is though if it’s something on the back-end for the base page content then you won’t get a lot of detail from the outside.
I highly recommend installing some performance reporting code that will report on the site performance as people use it (RUM as we call it).
Soasta’s mPulse is the best for reporting overall page performance and can provide details about which pages, when and what part of the page load is taking a long time (and is free for low-medium volume sites): http://www.soasta.com/mpulse/
If your servers are not running on shared hosting and you can install software/configure them then I also highly recommend installing New Relic. It will give you details about the performance of the server code itself and any back-end external dependencies. It is a free trial for the full solution for 30 days but can also be used indefinitely for free if you don’t need all of the features: http://newrelic.com/
It seems to me that this is a 3D cart site, and as such is hosted ( and on Microsoft servers ). As such, there’s very little that can be done outside of improving the image size.
Given your catalog size, location, and volume sales, I’d say that if you’re unhappy with your current provider, then migrating either to something like shopify ( which may or may not be an improvement* ), or to use a Magento server.
I think Cart2Cart will help with at least some of the pain of the process.
*Disclaimer, I know Magento intimately, Shopify not at all.
I got a lot of stuff to say. Go down to the bottom of this post to get a summary 
