WEBO Software landed in Portland

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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.