Web hosting for NZ based ecommerce?

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timmmay

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#1363043 11-Aug-2015 17:55

Test from the NZ speed test server is even better.

Incidentally your SEO is fairly poor - think basics like good title tags, H1 and H2 tags.

boland

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#1363145 11-Aug-2015 19:59

mattwnz: It loads for me now, although I see it is going through http, not https

Yes I have disabled "Force SSL". Only checkout and stuff is loading over SSL.

boland

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#1363602 12-Aug-2015 12:25

timmmay: Test from the NZ speed test server is even better.

Incidentally your SEO is fairly poor - think basics like good title tags, H1 and H2 tags.

Only issue I saw was a missing H1, that's fixed now. What other major issues do you see? All titles should be good, URL's are SEO-friendly, etc.

timmmay

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#1363612 12-Aug-2015 12:58

Consider looking at Google Adwords to see what people search for. People probably search for "dress shirts" or "casual" shirts far more than "trendy Italian dress shirts". You have your website name in the title twice - no point. Your sitemap has your homepage labeled as changing monthly. Your interior pages have titles like "About Us - Eurodress" - I'd have keywords in there. H2 tags are used poorly, perhaps shirt names should be that rather than relatively irrelevant text that you just want larger. You may want to improve your meta description keeping in mind search engines pretty much ignore it, it's purely for what goes under your listing in search results. I could probably go on. It's not bad, but it could be better.

Curious why it says "Roland" (then a surname) on the home page beside the sign out button. I suspect you've turned on too much caching without fully thinking it through and you're leaking personal information. This is a major issue.

boland

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#1364758 12-Aug-2015 16:51

timmmay: Consider looking at Google Adwords to see what people search for. People probably search for "dress shirts" or "casual" shirts far more than "trendy Italian dress shirts". You have your website name in the title twice - no point. Your sitemap has your homepage labeled as changing monthly. Your interior pages have titles like "About Us - Eurodress" - I'd have keywords in there. H2 tags are used poorly, perhaps shirt names should be that rather than relatively irrelevant text that you just want larger. You may want to improve your meta description keeping in mind search engines pretty much ignore it, it's purely for what goes under your listing in search results. I could probably go on. It's not bad, but it could be better.

Curious why it says "Roland" (then a surname) on the home page beside the sign out button. I suspect you've turned on too much caching without fully thinking it through and you're leaking personal information. This is a major issue.

Thank you. I've fixed the caching issue. I was only caching the homepage fully to make sure the initial page load is fast. Only thought about the shopping cart (which was working fine), but forgot about the current name.
Disabled caching for now.

Will do more SEO investigation. Already put quite some effort in it, but I see there is more work to do.

timmmay

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#1364776 12-Aug-2015 17:21

Cool, you've fixed the privacy issue, but of course it's a bit slower now, but not too bad. Your time to first byte is high, which indicates it's taking some time to generate the page. It's either lack of CPU to process or database - I guess you could look more into why it's going slow.

richms

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#1364877 12-Aug-2015 19:07

That is why those parts of the page are usually loaded separately from the page itself. It seems that many ecommerce platforms are still stuck in the pre-ajax era still, running stuff on the server to completion and then spitting out a single piece of HTML.

Richard rich.ms

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boland

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#1364907 12-Aug-2015 19:36

timmmay: Cool, you've fixed the privacy issue, but of course it's a bit slower now, but not too bad. Your time to first byte is high, which indicates it's taking some time to generate the page. It's either lack of CPU to process or database - I guess you could look more into why it's going slow.

Yes. The manager of the company behind Openhost has contacted me directly. Good steps have been made towards a solution for the performance!

boland

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#1364908 12-Aug-2015 19:38

richms: That is why those parts of the page are usually loaded separately from the page itself. It seems that many ecommerce platforms are still stuck in the pre-ajax era still, running stuff on the server to completion and then spitting out a single piece of HTML.

Yes, the shopping cart is updated after page load, but the initial HTML also contains the shopping cart.
The user name is loaded in the HTML.

To AJAX everything is not a solution either, but I agree that it would have been great if the HTML would not contain usernames and stuff. I could enable agressive caching then.

boland

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#1372568 23-Aug-2015 17:01

The solution provided by Openhost was a great attempt, I was upgraded to a better server with less websites, but still I wasn't happy with the performance. Besides that, some basics things like gzip and image caching was suddenly no longer working.

I've decided to create a VM on Azure, a shared VM is not that expensive. This weekend I've migrated the entire site, and everything is loading much faster.

Only thing is that Google Pagespeed Insights still reports that the server response time is 2.9 seconds, but on my local machine the entire site loads in 2.4 seconds: https://i.imgur.com/RuLICja.png
I understand there may be a difference, but not so big, right?

timmmay

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#1372572 23-Aug-2015 17:09

I wouldn't worry about 2.4 vs 2.9.

boland

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#1372576 23-Aug-2015 17:18

timmmay: I wouldn't worry about 2.4 vs 2.9.

I mean, according to Google, the TTFB is 2.4 seconds (it's now 1.5 seconds).
On my local machine the ENTIRE site loads in 2.4 seconds...

timmmay

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#1372579 23-Aug-2015 17:20

Try it from a couple of different testing sites. TTBF of 2.4 seconds isn't great, you want under 300ms. That usually needs a fast server or some kind of page caching, which I don't think is easy with your website.

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