Episerver CMS performance optimization – part 1

Update: In Episerver CMS 11, released today (November 21st 2017), the simpleaddress router has been moved to the last of the route table.

Original post:

This is an unusual post – it is not about Commerce – my area of expertise, but about CMS. Recently I’ve been working on some support cases where SQL Server instance is on high utilization, and in some scenarios it eventually slows down the site. After investigation, it’s likely to come from a small, simple and helpful feature: Simple address.

CMS content can have a property named “Simple address”, which allows you to create a “shortcut” url for that content. So if you have one page with “name in url” as “contact-us” under a page name “about-us” under Home page, you can access it via https://mysupercoolsite.com/en/about-us/contact-us. Or you can set the Simple address for that page as “contact-us”, and then you can access it directly via https://mysupercoolsite.com/contact-us.

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Merging carts when a customer logs in

It’s quite common when a customer browses your site without logging in – either she/he intentionally does that, or just forget about logging in. The customer might add some items to carts and even checks out, but then is asked to log in or remember to log in. What would happen?

By default, Episerver Commerce will do as following:

  • Attach all orders made by that section to logged in customer. (I once placed an order in a famous retailer in Sweden without logging in, and then I asked their customer service to link that order to my account so I can track it easier. To my surprise, it cannot be done! That’s why I personally appreciate this feature.)
  • Merge all carts to existing carts, by name and market. So if I’m currently in US market and I added a item to that cart, and the US-cart linked to my account already have 2 other items, then when I log in, my US-cart will contain 3 items.
  • Merge all wishlist to existing wishlists, also per market. (The name for wishlist, by default, is fixed to “Wishlist”)

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Multisite in Episerver Commerce

It seems that we currently have an increasing number of questions regarding multisite feature in Episerver Commerce. It’s fully supported in CMS. You can have only one site, one database to serve multiple domains – which of course reduces the cost. But can it be done in Commerce as well?

The answer is (as almost always): it depends on your definition of “multisite”: multisite can be that customers see multiple domains, which probably different styles, but in the backend everything is the same – you share the same collection of orders and customers. Or multisite can be that there is a separation in backend: each site has its own collection of orders and customers.
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