Jun 25, 2010

WEBO Site SpeedUp supports CS-Cart

WEBO Site SpeedUp for CS-Cart

With new version (1.2.0) WEBO Site SpeedUp completely supports CS-Cart as a native addon for this popular e-commerce solution. This addon has the following useful features:

  • Complete server side caching for anonymous users (and w/o any items in cart).
  • Smart cache clean up on product modifications.
  • Clean interface to access to all products features.
  • Complete client side acceleration provided with WEBO Site SpeedUp main product.

WEBO Site SpeedUp installation to CS-Cart is very easy. It's described in Wiki (and documentation): code.google.com/p/web-optimizator/wiki/InstallingCSCartPlugin. Also there are a lot of articles about application tuning and configuration.

WEBO Site SpeedUp for CS-Cart shows about 2-2.5x client side acceleration among 4-5x server side speedup (totally 10x speedup), and it is a must-have addon for successful CS-Cart e-stores.

You can check addon discussion on CS-Cart official forum here and here.

Jun 21, 2010

v1.2.0 released

With a lot of minor compatibility fixes, better CDN support and SaaS Edition new version of WEBO Site SpeedUp was released. What is new:

  • SaaS Edition. Now all trial keys work in SaaS mode, and you can pay only for enabled features. SaaS Edition is the same in functionality as Premium Edition, but every paid feature has its own price, and overall day outgo is calcualted as simple sum of enabled paid features. Also license prolongation is made simplier: you just need to increase internal application balance via modules codes. This will allow you to use WEBO Site SpeedUp as long as you want for your website. Also you can easily switch optimization cost by selecting active configuration and pay only its price.
  • Added option 'Extreme mode' for HTML caching. After deep research into website performance we added new feature which allows you to put performance of your website to the new level. With RewriteRules on Apache level you are able to completely eliminate all server side costs and make your website really faster than lightning. This option fits only static (or almost) websites, because all pages are hard cached, and cache reload is possible only as a manual action.
  • Fixed HTML Sprites placement. Improved internal logic for HTML Sprites images placement, this eliminated a number of known issues with them.
  • Added separate cache for mobile agents. Now website content for all known mobile agents is separated (as well as it done for IE browsers and the others), and you won't worry about your website compatibility with mobile browsers.
  • Improved caching for CSS/HTML Sprites. Now all Sprites has unique URLs to force cache reload on their re-creation. Please note: you must disable and enable WEBO Site SpeedUp to make this feature working.
  • Improved PHP proxy library.
  • Improved caching / gzip / CDN usage.
  • Minor fixes.

You can download or update your WEBO Site SpeedUp to get all these new features.

Jun 16, 2010

WEBO Software landed in Portland

Download PDF, 577 Kb

Most of our site pages are loading in under 2 seconds, compared to the 8 or 9 seconds we started with. This has lead to a substantial increase in the both the average time on site as well as the number of page views. The increased speed has also resulted in a higher conversion rate.

Langocity is a e-commerce website based on Magento that specializes in selling a wide range of foreign language courses and translation software. Their server is located in Portland, Oregon, and receives 30-40,000 visitors from east to west coast every month. Even with mid-level VPS hosting specifically tuned for Magento (which is used as a CMS solution for Langocity) and current CDN (EdgeCast) the site’s load time was too high, resulting in many visitors exiting the site after only several pageviews.

Langocity described the situation, “Even with a well provisioned and tuned server, Magento has a reputation for being somewhat slow, due to the complexity of the shopping cart software. We wanted to improve our pageload times, which were unacceptably slow both for our U.S. customers as well as our customers overseas.”

“In the past, we had implemented a content delivery network on our site, but due to Magento’s complexity, it wasn’t possible to combine all of our JS and CSS files and have them delivered over the CDN without incredibly complex customization. We were concerned with having to support this customization over time, which would be a distraction from the core business. WEBO Site SpeedUp allowed us to fix this issue easily while also optimizing the site in a number of other ways that we hadn’t even considered implementing due to the amount of work it would have required.”

WEBO Site SpeedUp has a numerous number of optimization modules, and almost all of them had to be implemented to completely speedup Langocity, starting from assets merging and finishing with advanced CDN settings for secured connection. Fortunately all of these modules are included into one package with various settings, which makes the website acceleration process very simple and straight forward.

According to Langocity, “One issue that WEBO Site SpeedUp really fixes is an implementation of a wide range of speed optimization techniques that your average developer is not aware of or isn’t too interested in implementing due to the time or effort required for what appears to be a small payoff. For a lot of people, shaving a few milliseconds off page load here or there isn’t worth optimizing. However, when you start applying a wide range of techniques those milliseconds add up to multiple seconds saved, which is very substantial. Since WEBO Site SpeedUp is applying the changes to our site without having to modify our underlying Magento installation, it’s saved a great deal of time and allows our Magento developers to focus on making sure the site runs well, rather than having to spend time implementing very complex page optimization techniques.”

After WEBO Site SpeedUp had been fully implemented, Langocity’s website became about 4x faster. Customers are clearly enjoying the faster site as Langocity has experienced a significantly higher conversion rate and lower bounce rate since WEBO Site SpeedUp has optimized the site.

Jun 10, 2010

WEBO Software supports healthy life style

Download PDF, 721 Kb

Website load speed was remarkably increased, and this makes happy both website visitors and editors.

Web portal about health, «Be healthy» (vllv.ru) was launched in spring, 2010. Right after its launch there was decided to speed the website up to make it ready for high traffic and public visitors. This way not only server resources usage should be optimized, but also visitors loyalty increased. Website audience at most consists of megacity residents, and they are accustomed to high website load speed. Therefore there must be applied exceptional measures to increase website quality.

Web portal uses a lot of external widgets (from social networks and Google), so its load speed depends a little from the current CMS (Joomla!) and VPS hosting. To improve the situation there was necessary to use only client side technologies acceleration, and it was the finest hour for WEBO Site SpeedUp.

Unobtrusive JavaScript (delayed loading) modules usage significantly improved current website load speed value (Google Webmasters data showed 2x speedup). And by the web portal management team, “website load speed was remarkably increased, and this makes happy both website visitors and editors.”

You must follow rough technological criteria and quality standards to make website working at maximum. And website load and interaction speed is crucial at this point of view (especially to fit audience expectations). Fast websites not only consume less server resources (CPU and I/O) per visitor, but also provide more comfortable pages surfing and information mining.

WEBO Site SpeedUp, being a complex solution to speed the website up both on server and client sides, allows you to apply tremendous set of technologies easily for your website and combine them on demand. Superior results of application work are proven by thousands of accelerated websites and a lot of satisfied users.

Jun 4, 2010

v1.1.3 released

More and more features before coming SaaS edition of WEBO Site SpeedUp:

    Improved HTML caching engine. We made one big step to include different in-memory solutions to handle HTML caching (to improve website response time). For now only disk is supported (by default), but we are going to add memcache, XCache, eAccelerator, etc soon. Also HTML cache is now separated by directories what improves I/O timings.
  • Added option to use HTTPS host with CDN. CDN usage was made completely compatible with all of known CDNs.
  • Added option to exclude JavaScript files from minify. It's very useful if some JavaScript files are already minified, and additional minify can break them. Now you can safely merge and minify all your JavaScript code.
  • Added option to include unobtrusive JavaScript loader as inline code. One less HTTP request with unobtrusive logic (with window.onload).
  • Improved JavaScript merging. Some minor fixes with JavaScript file placement and fix for Shadowbox base URL.
  • PixelBack and Verisign added to supported widgets.
  • CS-Cart added to supported systems (by native addon).
  • Minor fixes.

You can update to the latest version or download it from the website.