Virtuemart 2 Way to Slow - Negatively Impacting Sales

[ironlion37]

Hi,

I'm at my wits end with this virtuemart site:

http://www.thecrystalcache.com

After upgrading about 6 months ago from VM 1.1.9, site traffic dropped by half and sales dropped from about $1500 to $1800/month to almost nothing. The bounce rate shot up from 2% to 56%. Soft 404 Errors created by VM2 devastated SEO. The business has been hurt.

Over the next month in past years, sales are about $4500 and very much needed.

Google page speed for the site's home page is:
Desktop: 44/100
Mobile: 33/100

VM version 2.0.20b
Joomla 2.5.11

The template is a RocketTheme template and I've tried using their RokBooster plugin which can get the page speed up to 75/100 but it breaks the Virtuemart Checkout (cannot add products to cart when Javasrcipt compression is turned on:  http://www.rockettheme.com/forum/index.php?f=623&t=212245&rb_v=viewtopic). If anyone can help with that issue (getting RockBooster working with VM) - that would be a BIG help!

Note: changing the template does not significantly affect the google page speed.

The site is hosted on a GoDaddy shared plan which I realize it not good - but I think is also not the entire story (worked fine for years on VM 1.1.9).

Basically, I'm looking for help here as this has been a real disaster, funds are limited and I need to get this working for the holidays (the cart won't even load right now 3 out of 5 times due to slowness).

Thanks for any help!

[GJC Web Design]

http://forum.virtuemart.net/index.php?topic=120309.msg409850#msg409850

but I know from experience that carts need a decent server -

[Peter Pillen]

If I can suggest a different hosting ... check siteground ... I had the same problem and switched from One.com to siteground. A great improvement in loadtimes and stability.

[ironlion37]

Thanks for the suggestion. What plan did you purchase with them?

Also, here's a 1.1.9 site I built that gets an 84/100:

http://tribaltraditions.org

[Peter Pillen]

Looking at your code, you have possibilities to improve but the all-over size is pretty normal (too much http requests is a factor with yours)

I purchased the shared hosting > grow big. I host four websites on this one plan.

And if you wanna know if it was worth it ... this image below comes from my google webmaster > crawlstatistics from the biggest site on it. I didn't change a thing at the coding during the whole graph. I changed my hosting because of all kind of troubles and very inconsistent loading times (inconsistent proves to me that the hosting is sh*t). Google threw massive numbers of errors my way and just stopped crawling my site... same story as yours ... sales dropped (nearly same numbers as yours).

And to be clear ... the red line is the day I changed

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