Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento hosting, has added several new features and enhancements to its popular open source Turpentine extension for Magento. Turpentine provides improved Magento compatibility with Varnish, a very fast caching reverse proxy that can significantly increase response times and reduce latency for ecommerce stores built on the Magento platform.
Maximizing site responsiveness is a crucial part of ecommerce conversion rate optimization. Studies show that latencies measured in milliseconds can have a significant impact on conversions, reducing both sales and general customer satisfaction.
New features that improve Magento’s integration with Varnish include hole-punching via Varnish ESI and AJAX, Magento compiler compatibility, multi-site and multi-store support, and support for Magento’s built-in advanced session validation, which helps prevent session hijacking. The new features in Turpentine make using Varnish easier than ever before for a Magento webmaster; providing security, speed, and versatility.
Other new features enhance Turpentine’s caching technology, including external support for web crawlers for cache warming, and the inclusion of a built-in crawler for the same purpose. Cache-warming reduces the execution times of initial queries, leading to quicker response times for users who would have previously had to wait while database queries were processed. Mobile ecommerce is now better supported, with the ability to cache separate pages for mobile and desktop browsers.
In addition to the server-side caching of site assets with Varnish, Turpentine is also now capable of supporting client-side caching of static site assets like CSS, JavaScript, and images.
“Providing the fastest possible hosting environment for our Magento clients is a core focus at Nexcess,” commented Chris Wells, President and CEO of Nexcess, “Turpentine is one of the fruits of that labor. When used with our optimized dedicated or clustered Magento hosting plans Turpentine provides a visible enhancement to site responsiveness.”
Turpentine is released under the GPLv2+ open source licence and is freely available for developers and users. It requires Magento Community Edition 1.6+ or Magento Enterprise Edition 1.11+, and Varnish 2.1+ (including 3.0+).
