Performance is of an importance!
Regardless of how astonishing your site looks, none of the users will be able to enjoy it if it performs slowly and takes ages for pages to load. The website speed is a crucial factor when fighting for potential customers. We take this challenge very seriously and have made significant performance testing while developing our theme. As a result Shoppica uses different techniques to improve the server and client side rendering speed.
All of the content builder blocks are cached on the server to reduce the time needed to send them to the user. You can control the cache settings for every individual block to make sure the information it provides is fresh enough.
The system classes of the theme are automatically merged into one file to skip fetching them one by one on every request. We have analyzed opencart queries very closely and Shoppica adds some important indexes upon install, which optimize some database queries.
We followed closely the Google best practices for client-side performance. The frontend styles and scripts are combined, minified and statically served to the browser, which reduces load time and takes advantage of browser caching.
We also provide easy CDN integration - if you host your resources on a cloud delivery network you just need to change a single option in the theme’s settings.
Additionally we provide an optional vQmod extension which makes further improvements for sites with larger databases. This helps Shoppica to perform great on installations with thousands of products and categories and there is no need to install additional caching modules.
The various performance enhancements make Shoppica suitable for shared hosting.