Volusion is one of the best hosted ecommerce software available in the market with tons of features and very reliable ecommerce service provider company. Although they are little bit slow is upgrading their front end features, but now they are working hard to give more user friendly front end themes, still they will have to provide more access to their themes files.
Apart from this we hear that a lot of customer complain about their excessive bandwidth charges, so if you have a lot of products then you may have to calculate bandwidth usage. A large website with a lot of product mean more products files images/video/documents files, and every time a user access your website looking for products they will visit numerous pages and each time certain amount of server bandwidth is utilize in the form of js/css/icons/html/content but this may be very low percentage, the most of the bandwidth utilized is due to images/video/document and other media files, the more the size of files, the large bandwidth it takes.
There are couple of tips & tricks to reduce volusion bandwidth usages, they are as follows…
1) Optimize all your website images to the best possible way without loosing image quality, this will reduce bandwith usage to some extent.
2) Another most recommended trick is to host images to third party hosting server, there are several hosting company which provide economical hosting service.
The trick to making it manageable is to mimic Volusion’s directory structure on the file server site.
Typically, images on Volusion, (version 13), are stored in one of many different folders depending on what the image is used for and how it got uploaded into the store. Images uploaded with the Easy Editor end up in the /vspfiles/assets/images folder. Images used as category headings, manufacturer logos, color or size option related swatches and photos, and other types of images are in other folders. The product photos themselves are in the /vspfiles/photos/ folder.
Once your store is built and you have uploaded all the product photos and designed your store, you can use an FTP program like FileZilla and download the entire /vspfiles/ folder with all it’s subdirectories with a single click. You can then drag and drop the folder onto your new file server.
Let’s say you run a store at www.myecommercestore.com and you setup a file hosting site on third party server named www.myimageserver.com, now what you need to do is go through your Volusion store’s HTML and edit the (absolute AND relative) URL’s in the image tags — replacing the domain name, or in the case of relative URL’s adding http://www.myimageserver.com/ before path if any, and filename.
If you find a tag like:
<img src=”http://www.myecommercestore.com /vspfiles/assets/images/myfile.jpg”>
You would edit it to read:
<img src=”http://www.myimageserver.com/vspfiles/assets/images/myfile.jpg”>
If you find a tag like:
<img src=”/vspfiles/assets/images/somefile.gif”>
You would edit it to read:
<img src=”http://www.myimageserver.com/vspfiles/assets/images/somefile.gif”>
Thats all! Those images will now be pulled from your file server, and will not be counted towards your Volusion bandwidth.
Since you do get some bandwidth included in all hosting plans, you may decide it’s easier to have only some of the images served by your file server – and leave others to Volusion. If you’re frequently changing certain images, it may be better to leave those on Volusion.
There are other methods. For instance, instead of manually editing the HTML, you could use Javascript getElementsByTagName(“img”)and replace the src=”” value in your image tags.
If you have large .SWF / .FLV video files, you could setup IFRAME tags to pull the video content into the Volusion page. The user would never know the difference, and you could do all the setup as if the file were being viewed on the file server domain, (this way you would not have edit the paths for the SWF player in the embed code or end up having half the solution on one domain and half on the other).
If you don’t have time to go through all the code and manually update each domain name (or run the Javascript getElementsByTagName(“img”) and replace the src=”” value in your own image tags), you should consider using a Volusion Certified Expert like us Capacity Web Solutions Pvt Ltd. to make sure that no files are overlooked and you’re using the least bandwidth possible to maximize your savings.
We can host your volusion website images on cloudinary server as well. If you are looking for hosting your volusion store images to third party server to save on Volusion bandwidth charges then please feel free to Contact Us Here as we are Volusion Bandwidth Optimization Experts.
Please browse our Volusion Store Design & Development Work to know our Volusion expertise and proficiency level in Volusion Store Development and Volusion Template Design.