I am -very- unfamiliar with Magento development. I know how to do things via the graphical interface, but editing any code goes completely over my head. I am familiar with HTML and CSS and I can understand PHP and JS, so code isn't that foreign to me.
Anyway, my store loads very slowly. I ran a Pingdom speed test and it looks like scriptaculous is taking a long time to load.
I did some research and it looks like this has to do with the core functionality of Magento, but some people were asking if they need it? I'm not sure if my store would still work without it.
The URL is http://satcogrowlight.com. I have one theme installed and two extensions, one is Bassi slider and another is Dimensional Shipping.
How can I find out if I need Scriptaculous? If I don't need it, how can I disable it?
(Disclaimer: several things are making my website slow and I am looking into the other sources as well)
Thank you!
Edit: upon further research, looks like compressing it might help? How do I do that (if it's even possible)?
Edit: According to the Google PageSpeed tool, "Your page has 25 blocking script resources and 13 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.
None of the above-the-fold content on your page could be rendered without waiting for the following resources to load. Try to defer or asynchronously load blocking resources, or inline the critical portions of those resources directly in the HTML."
js/prototype/prototype.js
js/lib/ccard.js
js/prototype/validation.js
js/scriptaculous/builder.js
js/scriptaculous/effects.js
js/scriptaculous/dragdrop.js
js/scriptaculous/controls.js
js/scriptaculous/slider.js
Again, my question is: do I need Scriptaculous? If I don't need it, how can I disable it?
Best Answer
Your website is indeed taking a very long time to load.
Based on this Pingdom report, the following image is taking more than 4 seconds to load: http://satcogrowlight.com/uploaded-media/sub-banner-2.png
The overall slowness doesn't seem to be caused by Magento or the extensions but instead it seem like the server itself is very slow, especially when even a JPG image takes that much time to load.
You can try to optimize the image and maybe reduce it's size or even use a CDN but with the server being very slow, I doubt that will help much.
You may want to contact your hosting provider to see if they can improve the performance (for example by moving you to another server or switch to a different plan) as otherwise you may want to consider moving to another provider.