Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)

It’s been a long while in the making, but we’ve finally sent off our first module into the world to fend for itself (Magento Lightspeed Page Caching Module). It’s been interesting to try to carve out time to get it simplified, while still servicing clients, but it’s been worth doing things right. It’s taught us a few things.

1. Test a lot. There have been a few details to iron out, and we’ve learned most people don’t work with Magento the way we do. We tried early to garner extended user testing by offering free versions to several companies in exchange for their feedback. No feedback. I guess we get what we pay for. We did have a few companies stumble across the caching modules and purchase (a little before we were really ready). They’ve been very helpful and patient in their feedback.

2. It takes a lot to work out all the business details when it’s your business, and you’re pulling a different business model together while still performing other work. Still, in our current economy, our efforts to remain debt free have proven worth the extra effort. Now that the bulk of the set up is finished, we’ll very likely get more modules out without the extensive waiting.

3. You can’t build a great product if you don’t have great people working together. We’ve been uptight about hiring the best, and it’s proven essential. Hiring the right people, and helping them work together and thrive has been one of the best things we’ve ever done.

Lightning fast NEW Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)

We’ve read a lot about Magento being too slow. It’s a tremendously robust application with unlimited flexibility, so if you don’t know enough, it is. Discouraging. You’ll lose your job. Sad.

We didn’t know enough when we first started, went through the frying pan–fire thing, learned a ton, and have since created Magento sites with Google-like response times. Not discouraging. Keep our jobs. Take over the world.

Here’s a brief overview of making “slow” Magento serve 100x more content, 90% faster than a default Magento installation. Current page responses are in the 80-150 ms range for cached pages, 250 ms for pages including dynamic content (login status or cart).

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Because of the traffic volume Zumiez sees every day, we’ve had to make Magento perform much faster.

Our definition of ‘faster’ is twofold. First, front-end users shouldn’t have to wait 4 seconds to receive a page (significant conversion issues). Second, a site should be able to serve much, much more than 1 or 2 pages per second. Those are the 2 main factors we addressed with ‘faster’.

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