Fast templates for Magento?

[furman]

Hi,
I am in the process of setting up a magento 1.8.1CE store, I have tried a few templates and found that most templates even clean ones seem to lag except for the original and modern templates. Does anyone have any recommendations for neutral clean templates? I am not a designer so I just want a clean template with not too much going on.

Thanks

 

[antropy]

You will find that it's not the template but Magento itself that is slow. If you're still at the very early stages of the project I'd strongly suggest looking at alternative platforms such as OpenCart/Prestashop.

 

[Faevilangel]

antropy why do you keep telling people to switch from Magento, Magento is the best system in it's class by a long, long way so there is normally a reason why people go with it.

Your best is to speak to a developer / your host and see if they can speed it up a little, it's very rarely a template that slows a website down (unless it's coded poorly), it will normally be the hosting issue (not built for Magento).

 

[antropy]

antropy why do you keep telling people to switch from Magento, Magento is the best system in it's class by a long, long way so there is normally a reason why people go with it.

Because after thorough testing, developing sites with Magento and other platforms I've found that the code is bloated and overly complex, causing Magento to run very slowly on anything but a dedicated server.

The only reason that people go with Magento is that it's been marketed better and more people are aware of it. If you ask someone who doesn't know much about ecommerce what platforms are available, they'd say "ooh Magento, I've heard that's good" but they won't know why... and so the cycle continues.

 

[furman]

I agree Magento does run slow but I tried several templates, modern and the default were ok but others were really slow. I have seen scripts/patches which claim to increase speed by compressing scripts but I have not tried any of them.
I will have another look at Prestashop as I last tried it over a year ago and it seems to have changed a bit since.

 

[dx3webs]

Because after thorough testing, developing sites with Magento and other platforms I've found that the code is bloated and overly complex, causing Magento to run very slowly on anything but a dedicated server.
.

Magento is THE biggest e-commerce platform for reason. We can provide you with an endless list of stores running on reasonably priced shared hosting with sub 1 second load times. (fifteen quid pm) It is just blatantly misleading to suggest that magento requires a dedicated server.

 

[antropy]

Magento is THE biggest e-commerce platform for reason.

Yes, marketing

We can provide you with an endless list of stores running on reasonably priced shared hosting with sub 1 second load times.

Magento CE, out the box on a standard cPanel install?

 

[dx3webs]

CE out of the box.. yes. By "standard" I am assuming you mean poorly configured. In which case.. no, However, I can't imagine why anyone would trust their business (and often food on the table) to a 'standard' anything.

 

[antropy]

By "standard" I am assuming you mean poorly configured.

Well it's all relative, there must be a reason why it's configured the way it is as standard.

Anyway I'd be keen to see some of these fast-loading Magento sites...

 

[edmondscommerce]

Notepad is faster than my IDE, but I use an IDE for coding. The reason is because it has a LOT more power. And I have plenty of RAM and a decent CPU so its not an issue for me.

Yes if I want to load a text file as quickly as possible its not the right solution, but with my IDE I can work a lot faster and get a lot more done with less of my effort.

There isn't much point comparing opencart to Magento in terms of just speed. It is accepted that opencart is faster than Magento. But a reasonable sized ecommerce business can afford the higher levels of hosting requirement (well specified shared as a minimum) compared to opencart (will run nicely on bog standard shared hosting).

This thread was specifically about speed comparison between Magento themes. The OP was looking for advice on a theme that runs nicely as standard. Magento, like any open source system has extensions and themes that are good and well written, and others that leave a lot to be desired. I know I have seen lots of them.

Ultimately the best solution is almost certain to be a bespoke solution featuring only the very minimum amount of functionality you require and nothing more. That applies to any platform.

Enough with the banal Magento bashing and lets try and help people answer their specific questions and not hijack threads for personal gain or soapboxing.

UKBF used to be better than this.

</rant>

 

[antropy]

Notepad is faster than my IDE, but I use an IDE for coding. The reason is because it has a LOT more power. And I have plenty of RAM and a decent CPU so its not an issue for me.

Nice comparison. And yes, I do use Notepad++ to code

This thread was specifically about speed comparison between Magento themes. The OP was looking for advice on a theme that runs nicely as standard.

Yeah, fair point. I was just thinking that often when looking at an IT problem it can be worth re-examining the business problem. In this case it seems to be to have a fast ecommerce site and there may be no actual need to use Magento?

 

[edmondscommerce]

Nice comparison. And yes, I do use Notepad++ to code

No wonder you don't like Magento. I used to use a text editor but I now use PHPStorm and its simply amazing in comparision, even for OpenCart or Wordpress or whatever I think its essential equipment.

For Magento you don't have a chance if you aren't using an IDE

 

[antropy]

No wonder you don't like Magento. I used to use a text editor but I now use PHPStorm and its simply amazing in comparision, even for OpenCart or Wordpress or whatever I think its essential equipment.

Interesting perspective, I had a quick look at PhpStorm and it does look good although it's not open source or cross platform which I tend to prefer.

For Magento you don't have a chance if you aren't using an IDE

I really don't mean to bash Magento any further but surely this is because they're not applying this pinciple:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

 

[edmondscommerce]

no they aren't

 

[furman]

Can anyone recommend any scripts that will help speed up magento if it is not the themes? I would prefer Magento long term rather than using something for now and then changing later.

 

[dx3webs]

How many products do you have in your database?
Is it only the front page affected or are all categories?
Do CMS pages take a long time to load?
How many store views do you have?

regarding speed in general..

Speak to your host. If it is that bad they should be able to help.
There are no scripts as such. The basics should help:
Make sure caches are on (you would not believe how often these are off by mistake) Magento is SLOW without the caches.
if you have a larger catalog.. ensure flat categories and flat products are set to On
Make sure your host is running some sort of byte-cache for php.
If your site has been running for a long time clear out any bloated log tables in the database.
(there is a never ending list of things you can do to improve things but these are the basics that will give the best results.. everything else is degrees of a second after this)

Run your site through the following http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ (select a euro server under advanced) and gtmetrix.com. Both will help identify areas for improvement.

 

[HostLoveUK]

Depending on your hosting solution you may be able to tweak configrations to speed up your Magento by adding various extensions

 

[edmondscommerce]

The main thing to get the front end running quickly is to implement full page caching. The exact way to do that depends on your requirements and your hosting. If possible use Varnish but if not there are extensions that do it in pure PHP.

Be aware of holepunching - this is where dynamic page elements (such as the basket) are still dynamic even though the rest of the page is being served from cache. Any full page caching system will need this to be the most useful and again it depends exactly how you set it up and on your theme.

Note - this should be done after you have done all the basics mentioned by Dx3, its the icing on the cake

 

[RepricerExpress]

You need a hefty server setup to run Magento but in relation to your original query, ThemeForest.net is a good source of templates. As mentioned by others, the speed of the site may not be your templates, but the spec of your setup and its ability to handle Magento well.