Opencart Optimization Guide

This will be a step by step guide that will optimize any Opencart website. Opencart being a opensource PHP shopping cart is great but has many flows and those flows render it not appropriate for big businesses. But what if you fix these flaws or get a way around them?

The main and most important problem of Opencart is that the default version is not ready for escalation, what i want to say is that  after some time and after including many products + categories your website’s speed will degrade exponentially, well this sounds horrible and it is. I have personally experienced in my website a waiting time ranging from 2 to 24 seconds and this is for TTFB only.

But first we need to understand that TTFB (Time To First Byte) is an abbreviation used for the time it takes for the server to start sending data to the client after the handshake is finished, as you understand this means that after the server receives a request will start processing the data and after all the preparations are done will send the reply and thus the client will get the rendered page. So TTFB is only a server-side issue and us you understand the code logic and other low hanging fruits are the culprits.

So this guide will focus on optimizing the speed of your website by ensuring that most of the server-side issues are covered and TTFB will remain low, by the way TTFB normally ranges from 200 to 500 milliseconds if your values are higher this serves as a sign that something is wrong and you should take care of it. But lets not rush now, we need to take this step by step, so we can understand it better and have the maximum result.

First of all we need to check if you even need to take in consideration this guide, a simple website test in www.webpagetest.org should suffice.

Guide Chapters:

Day 1 => Removing Category Counts.

Day 2 => Excessive Code Maintenance.

Day 3 => Database Optimizations.(huh maybe i should not start this topic, is a really hard one)