Good news. The 2014.2 release makes your store faster than ever before!

Over the last several months we had many soft releases for app settings, server maintenance, virtualization efforts and architecture improvements and now this one release pulls it all together with all kinds of extra horsepower!

And you’ll see for yourself, when we say this stuff is super fast!

But before rolling into the new updates, here is a quick reminder of the performance related features you’ve had for awhile:

  • Browser-side image caching so that images never have to reload from the server.
  • Browser-side file caching of popular static files like Javascript and CSS.
  • Server based Gzip compression of all pages and assets in order to reduce page size.
  • Minified common resources like our bootstrap, jquery and other reference libraries to reduce their size and make downloads faster.

With the above serving as our baseline, we made speed and performance our primary focus.

Chasing this kind of speed meant relentless targeting of key metrics and improving them one by one. To do this, we used many testing tools to measure load times, server response times and other key optimization indicators. And this release paid off with an enhanced user experience and dramatically decreased load times across the app and servers.

In fact, the homepage and other key pages of the app saw dramatically decreased “first byte” load times. In most cases, pages start loading in less than 200 milliseconds! We’re talking about speeds that create a lighting fast user experience.

For store owners, front-end developers and theme creators, you can now manage and optimize many of these settings, clear cache and enable caching within your AmeriCommerce theme.

Additional performance gains and speed improvements include:

  • Optimized widgets that render the cached results in order to speed up their load times.
  • Reduced hits on the database across all pages in the app - greatly accelerating how fast pages lead.
  • Processing merge code more efficiently (and faster).
  • Sharing common data across all users further increasing load speed.
  • Speed optimized the most critical pages of the app. This includes home, product, category, manufacturer, search, cart and checkout pages.

App infrastructure and architecture has been further optimized as well.

  • The server-side processing and delivery of the app is now pre-compiled as an “in-memory” app instead of individual pages that have to be hit and loaded.
  • The infrastructure is now fully virtualized in a private cloud for bursting during large traffic spikes or for upgrading to new hardware.

The overall impact is impressive.

  • 50-300% reduction in time to send content from server.
  • Can now handle 50-100 times more concurrent requests / people hitting the site at exactly the same time.
  • Can now serve 10-50 times more pages per second.
  • 25-60% smaller downloads due to compression and minification efforts.
  • Due to faster delivery of content, the average time on site and conversion metrics increase substantially.

Along with all the improvements, you’ll find additional goodies in this release too. Check out our roundup post with all the details!

Happy selling guys!