Pages on Site take ages to load - need help

[personalizedgiftsandmore.com]

Hi everyone,

 

I'm a complete novice and was hoping that someone out there can help me. My website (www.personalizedgiftsandmore.com) has about 2500 products, but unfortunately it takes forever to load each page. It seemed to be loading much faster when there were about 2100 products. The database has been optimized already, but wanted to know if anyone has any ideas for what may cure, or cause this problem.

 

I'm getting hits daily but, I beleive due to the slow response time of the site I am losing sales. Also, just out of interest, how many hits usually convert into actual sales? i.e. 100 hits averages about 1 sale.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

George

[jon_l]

First thing is to install one of the image thumbnail contributions. This will reduce the size of your page a lot, which will improve loading times. At the moment when you view a page the full size images are being downloaded and then resized - a thumbnail contribution will create special small sized versions of the images.

 

The category product counts can slow things down, this can be de-activated.

 

Have you activated the osCommerce cache facility?

 

If you're using shared hosting it can be difficult figuring out whether it is your website or the server that is causing pages to load slowly. Its worth talking to your hosting company to see if they can help.

 

Jon.

[personalizedgiftsandmore.com]

Thanks Jon. I'll look into your recommendations and post if there were any positive changes. I'll have to check on the cache facility.

 

Cheers,

 

George

[jasonabc]

Your homepage weighs in at a whopping 272k - 241k of these are product images.

 

Optimise all your images for the web to bring the filesizes down - that will solve most of your load problems.

[personalizedgiftsandmore.com]

Thanks everyone. The pages are now stored on the Cache for about 5 days so this seems to have solved my problems. I tried the other things that you mentioned jon but they didn't seem to help. Thanks again

 

George