Common Causes of Site Performance Issues

Content Delivery Network (CDN)

SEO Page Generator and Time To First Byte (TTFB)

Image Optimization

Page Rendering

Item Search API

Commerce Categories

Scriptable Cart

User Event Scripts

Shopping Environment Short Cache

Test if the CDN is Working

The most common cause of site performance issues is that the CDN is not working at all. When you initially set up a site, it is customary to deactivate caching because of frequent updates to the site and wanting to avoid old files being served or needing to constantly invalidate the cache. So it’s easy to forget to reactivate caching when the site goes live. To check whether you’ve enabled the CDN, see Enable CDN Caching for instructions.

SEO Page Generator and Time To First Byte (TTFB)

Part of the architecture behind your site’s frontend is the SEO page generator. One of its primary uses is to generate static, fully-rendered versions of your site’s pages so they can be crawled by search engines that may not be able to process JavaScript on the fly.

Time to First Byte (TTFB) is a performance metric that measures the delta between the time a browser requests content and when it starts to receive it. In simple terms, the web browser goes through the following process:

  1. Looks up domains using DNS
  2. Makes a TCP connection
  3. Negotiates security via TLS/SSL
  4. Sends a request for content
  5. Waits for content (while timing TTFB)
  6. Begins receiving content

Image Optimization

Images are often the single biggest contributor to page size and performance. Several methods are available to optimize images, including increasing their compression to reduce each image’s size and reducing the number of images on a page. For more information

Page Rendering

Page rendering performance refers to a different kind of performance—perceived performance. If you improve a page’s perceived performance, you give users the impression that the page is loaded and ready to use. Often the perception of good performance is just as important as the actual, measured performance.

Item Search API

Almost all item data on your site is requested through the Item Search API. When a query is made, the NetSuite search service goes through your site’s index, finds which items should be returned, and then performs a database query to return those items. There is a performance cost when the query is processed and the data returned.

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