5 New NitroPack Features to Boost Your OpenCart 3.x Site Performance
Your hosting provider is the main factor that defines E-Commerce page loading and site performance score. However, the caching system you're using is what determines how far you can optimize your OpenCart to reach its maximum speed.
Currently, 2.5 seconds of page loading time is the perfect middle ground that global retail sites were reaching on average around Black Friday 2017.
Two and a half seconds is not an easy benchmark to reach, especially when you got a few thousand products and images to load.
And let’s not even mention all the CSS and JavaScript resources that come with them.
So, what can you do in OpenCart 3.x to address your PageSpeed score?
Keep reading.
NitroPack 3.5.12 (For OpenCart 3.x)
The most popular caching solution for OpenCart got updated!
You will learn about the 5 new improvements that aim to help more stores reach an optimal Page Speed score and become blazing fast for an easier shopping experience.
In the points below, we will explain each subject a bit better so you can understand how and why it helps make your OpenCart 3.x shop faster and easier to browse by customers.
New Feature: Image Lazy Loading
Technically, Lazy loading of images means they are loaded only when they need to be displayed. This way they do not take unnecessary bandwidth and allow other resources like CSS and JavaScript to load faster. This translates to faster page loads and less bandwidth used.
They get loaded only when you scroll to them so they must appear in the browser’s viewport. For example - Unsplash:
If you don’t scroll all the way down, the images at the bottom won’t even bother getting loaded.
What does that mean for your Page Speed?
If you have pages with lots of images on your site, and your theme does not have a built-in lazy loader for them, you can use the new NitroPack feature.
It’s located in the Image Optimization tab:
When Image Lazy Loading is enabled, the page load time will not be slowed down by all the images loading synchronously, because they will be loaded after the rest of the resources are.
Only images positioned in the currently viewable area of the site are loaded, which gives a healthy boost to your page loading speed with NitroPack.
Improvement: Improved DOM Parser Performance
When NitroPack does it’s optimizations over the HTML code, it uses a DOM parser to understand the structure of the code and have a robust way of making modifications to it.
(Source: CodingBasics)
This release improved the performance of this parser, so now NitroPack can understand the HTML and perform all modifications faster.
Improvement: Better Generation of Combined CSS Files
Imagine this as an auto-correct for misspelled CSS files missing their brackets. This new improvement automatically closes CSS scopes that are not closed while generating a combined CSS file.
Sometimes there are semantic issues within CSS files where some closing scope brackets are omitted, which causes issues when combining such files with other CSS files.
This improvement closes the missed brackets in corrupt CSS files in order to fix these issues when combining CSS files. You can find it in the Minification tab of NitroPack’s Control Panel.
Improvement: A Better Way of Deferring CSS
NitroPack now uses a new and better way of deferring CSS. This change gives much better results in removing render-blocking resources from a page.
Improvement: Automatically Disable Journal's Cache
NitroPack can now automatically disable the Journal Cache while fetching image dimensions, so the image groups can be captured more accurately without any interference.
The automatic image dimensions scanner now works more reliably with Journal Theme and gives better performance and less compatibility issues.
Eat, Sleep, Optimize, Repeat.
5 new NitroPack improvements that help your OpenCart 3.x store to reach new record speeds. We’re already working on implementing even more new features and adding more improvements based on customer feedback and our observation of OpenCart stores that we’re working with. Be the first to get the updates in our iSenseLabs Weekly posts!
