Enhance performance in Commerce Connect

Optimizely Commerce Connect performance depends on many factors. An ecommerce site should perform well enough during peak times to keep each customer's shopping experience smooth and convert carts to sales. The site should also perform well from small catalogs (50–100 products) to large catalogs (100,000 entries or more).

Consider the following strategies to run your site at peak performance.

Install a supported version of Commerce Connect

Upgrade to a supported version of Commerce Connect to pick up performance improvements.

Strategies for large catalogs (300,000 entries or more)

• Implement an enterprise-level search provider, such as Solr, which efficiently indexes large catalogs.
• Eliminate or reduce the number of calls to the product catalog or database when returning product information during the browsing, search, or checkout process. Search is the critical element with large catalogs because search response time drives perceived site performance.

Strategies for high-volume or high-load sites

• Run performance tests before peak periods. Commerce Connect ships test scripts that you can adapt to your scenarios. Plan to spend as much time testing as implementing.
• Implement your Commerce Connect site in a load-balanced environment to handle the expected traffic.
• Consider a cloud-based hosting environment. Commerce Connect is tested in the cloud. This environment scales infrastructure on demand without an investment in physical servers.
• Implement fail-over or backup servers that can handle additional load.

Session state management

Session state introduces noticeable overhead that can affect performance. To reduce the overhead, enable session state only on pages that need it.