We recently took steps to improve the page load speed of WebsiteCM and the changes were noticeable; we received many requests for information on how we improved our load times so drastically. To help you with your own x-cart speed optimization, here's a summary of changes we made:

• Improved our Server/Host
  Performance starts with your server/host. The processing of the server minimizes time to construct dynamic pages, and the hosts' network connection determines the maximum speed those pages and files can be delivered. Our server was a bit dated, so we knew we wanted to update it. We also wanted a fast network, so we narrowed our options down to a handful of reputable hosts, and tested download speeds of 100MB file from the data center our server would be hosted from. After evaluating speed and other factors, we opted to host with Hands-On-Web-Hosting on a Xeon Nehalm Quad Core server with 12GB of RAM. We also found the network connection to be twice as fast as our previous network at The Planet.
• X-Cart Optimization
  After moving the site to the new server, we evaluated our processing benchmarks in comparison to the last time we optimized our site, and made changes to speed up the dynamic processing of the site as per our X-Cart Performance/Speed Optimization.
• Benchmarked/Optimized Components
  We evaluated the components of our x-cart, disabled items that were not being utilized and determined items that were running excessively slow. Our Live Chat program for example was taking over a second to load. We rewrote the code for Live Chat to still function dynamically while executing in just a fraction of a second.
• Page Speed / YSlow Optimization
  Our X-Cart Performance/Speed Optimization takes care of many of the suggestions of Page Speed and YSlow, but we wanted to take it to the extreme, so we did some serious optimizations allowing us to score a 100/100 on YSlow and 93/100 on Page Speed (Google Analytics and X-Carts css usage being the reasons for the lost points).
• Setup a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
  A content delivery network allows you to host your static content (css, images, javascript and other non-dynamic content) on a network of servers located all over the world. When those files are then accessed by a user, the file is served from the server located closest to the user. Using a CDN, if you're in LA files are sent to you from LA, if you're in NY you get files sent to you from NY, and if you're in Australia, you get files sent from a server located in Australia. The result of a CDN is far less lag in the time the file is traveling through a network, and much faster speeds. We setup our CDN on a subdomain of websitecm.com and ensured the subdomain was cookieless.

As a result of the changes made, WebsiteCM's load time of a dynamic, non-cached page, for us on a standard cable connection, went from 2.7 seconds to 0.6 seconds. While we're still in the process of optimizing our sub-pages such as category and product listings, we've already seen noticeable improvement in Google's recorded site performance times.