Best Practices for Optimizing AbanteCart Performance on Shared Hosting

[katyperry]

Hello everyone,

I've been running my AbanteCart store for a while, and everything works fine, but I notice that on shared hosting, the performance sometimes slows down, especially when product pages have many images or during checkout.

I'd like to ask the community:

What are the best practices to improve AbanteCart performance on shared hosting?

Are there any recommended caching plugins or settings within AbanteCart that make a noticeable difference?

Do you think upgrading to VPS is necessary for a medium-sized store (~500 products), or can shared hosting still handle it with the right optimizations?

Any tips on image optimization and database cleanup?

I believe this topic could help not only me but also many others who run AbanteCart stores on budget hosting. Looking forward to your advice and shared experiences!

Thank you in advance.

[ixl]

I have had and noticed the same issue and my site only has 100 products.

Other packages I used didn't have this problem so I just wonder if the code just needs revision or / and a optimization.

[Basara]

Hello.
When a product or category page is opened for the first time, AbanteCart resizes images and builds thumbnails. This takes some server memory and can look slow at first. After thumbnails are created and if cache is enabled in store settings, pages will load faster.

Another good option is to use an image CDN, so images load from CDN servers instead of your shared hosting. This can speed things up a lot.

Shared hosting can work fine with proper caching and image optimization, but if the store grows or traffic is heavy, a VPS will give more stable performance.