Hey Smallfish, interesting. As someone who runs these test all the time on our sites I would like to point out that your comparison here is not quite testing apples to apples. Looks to me that you are using the demo sites provided by each of the carts. And part of the delivery results are impacted by how the servers are configured and the hosting company setup. In order to have a true comparison the test must be run on either the same server or servers that are configured in the same manner and at the same hosting company.
And looking at the difference in the home pages of the two sites - if you configured Abantecart with lesser sections as the opencart is, you can get faster loads, etc. Open cart ONLY has a two image graphic banner and just a Featured section with 4 products. Abantecart has the slider with 5 rotating images, Featured, Specials, latest, Bestsellers,
two additional banner areas, and manufacturers, plus the testimonials etc. All that takes extra time.
But as the store owner you need to determine if your opening page info for various sections is important to your bottom line or a cleaner faster loading page is going to get the dollars in your bank account.
so your comparison is well-intentioned but the testing is not very fair in the comparisons factors IMO.
Lee
