Optimize Your Zen Cart Site, NOW!

Zen Cart is an open source, PHP/MySQL based Ecommerce shopping cart solution. It’s free and the source code is completely customizable by anyone who wants to modify or develop it. As far as open source software goes, Zen Cart is a giant. Even though it’s free, it gives some commercial carts a run for their money in terms of services offered.

Zen Cart is a very powerful software–some programmers and designers won’t use anything else. After a lot of research and testing I came to the conclusion that Zen Cart could indeed be an excellent Ecommerce solution for some businesses, but a total headache for others. Since it’s been around for so long there is a lot of user feedback available. 

Optimize Your Zen Cart Site

The following tips is to help you to optimize your Zen Cart site performance:

Use Recommended Web Hosting

It is the number 1 factor that directly influence the speed of your Zen Cart web site. Hosting your Zen cart online shop on a recommended and reliable web hosting. There are a couple of hosting companies that support Zencart Hosting. Our team has reviewed and used over 50 hosting companies. HostForLIFEASP.NET is awarded the Best, Cheap, Recommended Zencart hosting start from Є3.00/month. HostForLIFEASP.NET Zencart hosting is configured on latest MySQL that comes with latest tech support and security fixes.

HostForLIFEASP.NET optimized the Windows and IIS in the best configuration for the shared web hosting. They provide cheap, best and instant activation on your Zen cart hosting account Once you install. You will enjoy the full support of the experienced HostForLIFEASP.NET team, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Affordable Budget prices, full features, 99.9% Uptime Guarantee, No Risk Money-Back Guarantee - come and see for yourself why everyone is recommending HostForLIFEASP.NET for Zencart.

Optimize the database

Optimize the database used by the Zen Cart based web site. Write the following code:
mysqlcheck -u<username> -p<password> --auto-repair --check --optimize <database name>

If you have phpMyAdmin installed on your web hosting, your Zen Cart database, select all tables and pick the ‘Optimize table’ option from the drop-down menu located below the tables’ list.

The DirectAdmin or WHM/cPAnel control panels make the database management even easier through a simple, intuitive web-based graphical interface.

Upgrade Zen Cart whenever a new version is available

It is always a good idea to upgrade to the latest Zen Cart version available to improve performance and security of your web site.

Optimize images

Assuming that you are already using the latest version of Zen Cart available (at the time of writing this article, the latest stable version of Zen Cart is 1.5.1), you can install Image Handler 4 plugin that will automatically and losslessly optimize your images thus resulting in faster loading of the web site pages overall. For more information on how to configure and use the Image Handler 4 Zen Cart plugin please read the corresponding sections of the Image Handler 4 readme file.

Turn off the Category Counts

Log in to the Zen Cart admin area and navigate to ‘Configuration’ > ‘My Store’ > ‘Show Category Counts’ and disable it by selecting the ‘False’ radio-box, then click on the ‘Update’ button.