Bookstand.in an online book retailer selling books worldwide. Bookstand.in has a catalogue of appx. 170,000 products spread across 70+ categories and selling books from 2500+ publishers. Bookstand.in is using nopCommerce as their e-commerce platform. This case study focuses on how nopAccelerate helped Bookstand.in to reduce page load time of their e-commerce website using their expertise in optimizing nopCommerce store performance.

Issues faced

Bookstand.in was facing a speed and performance related issue with their store. Earlier it was taking almost 20-60 seconds to load a home page under light to medium load. Similarly, all the other pages like category pages, product detail pages as well as topic pages are slower too.

Moreover, the search was not working properly at all. Not only the search performed slowly, but the search result quality was poor too. For example, the site is selling books and when you search for book name; and if name is not exact, you don’t get any results. For instance, if you search for “seven habits” – you get 0 results, “seven habits of highly effective people” – 0 results, “7 habits” – 0 results, “7 habits of highly effective people” – 0 results, “7 habits of effective people” – 0 results. Why? Because the name consists “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and all the searches I given was not exact! The full text search was working, but you can’t expect your visitors to remember exact name. Moreover, it was not treating inflectional form of word as same while searching. And the relevancy or rank order was improper too. It was just too difficult to find the exact product you are looking for.

How these issues impacts the business?

When you’re selling something online; speed is the one of the most important parameter that affects your site’s conversion rate. Due to the slow site and poor search relevancy visitors were not able to find the exact product they were looking for. The site was not usable at all and the speed was just not acceptable to the buyer!

How nopAccelerate helped?

When nopAccelerate steps in, it analysed the site, it was quick to understand their issue. The issue was very serious due to which the Bookstand.in was losing not just visitors but the business too.

nopAccelerate quickly recommended several steps and one of them is to integrate Apache Solr using the nopAccelerate Solr Plugins. Apart from using nopAccelerate Solr plugin, there are few other steps recommended and implemented by the nopAccelerate team to further improve the performance.

Results after implementation

After nopAccelerate’s implementation, the Bookstand.in started to perform very well. If we look at the some of the metrics, then Home page performance got improved 24 times, Category page is now almost 18 times faster than before, similarly all the pages are faster than before.

The nopAccelerate team also integrated nopAccelerate Solr Search plugin to enhance search area of the site. And it helped Bookstand.in to offer superior search results with better relevancy and true full text search.

The site is now more usable and pleasant to use.

Before and after analysis

Here are the few of the before and after comparison  on how nopaccelerate reduce page load time of their few important pages.

Above picture compares the time in seconds it took to load home page before and after nopAccelerate integration.

Above picture compares the time in seconds it took to load category product listing page before and after nopAccelerate integration.

Above picture compares the time in seconds it took to perform Search before and after nopAccelerate integration.

Above picture compares the time in seconds it took to load Product Detail Page before and after nopAccelerate integration.

Above picture compares the time in seconds it took to load topic page before and after nopAccelerate integration.

Business benefits

nopAccelerate helped bring server usage under control and also improved front end page load time. This resulted in improving site usability as well as reduced bounce rate of the site and improved conversion rate. This improved Bookstand.in’s capacity to serve more customers on the same hosting infrastructure.

Now, visitors can find exact product they are looking for much faster using the more powerful and relevant search results. The quality of the search results improved too.

Client’s review

Before nopAccelerate we were struggling with speed and search of our portal and the end user experience was also very bad. After, we switched to nopAccelerate, it resulted in better Acquisition rate, better performance of site and better customer experience. We surely recommend nopAccelerate.

This implementations benefits us by optimizing aspects like

• Better acquisition rate
• Better search capability
• Better customer satisfaction

Thanks to nopAccelerate team for their best support!!!