We’ve been working with e-commerce platform Magento for a while now, and have found it to be a great fit for clients looking for an all-in-one e-commerce solution. However, the stock open source Magento is quite slow, and needs both good hosting and a number of plugins to really get it to where an ecommerce platform needs to be.

We’ve published a few speed guides as part of our work with our GTmetrix project, but for Magento, we went a step further and created a Magento plugin called GTspeed.

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Search Engine Optimization is on everyone’s lips in the IT world today, as more and more companies are looking for ways to increase their search engine rankings. While GT isn’t an SEO shop, we try to ensure that the sites and pages we build are created using sound SEO principles. If you’re looking at optimizing your own site, here are a few basic tips and resources to help get you started.

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Aeroplan is Canada’s premier coalition loyalty program. Enabling millions of members to earn and redeem Aeroplan Miles, Aeroplan works with more than 75 partners in the financial, retail, and travel sectors. Aeroplan’s internal servers process approximately 6000 transactions every day, and an operation of this size needed a reliable and rock-solid hosting solution. In close collaboration with Aeroplan’s techs, Gossamer Host mapped out an extra-redundant server cluster custom-fitted for their internal operations.

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Speed is a critical element in a user’s experience of any website, and Google has suggested that load times may become a factor in page ranking. With this in mind, GT is excited to introduce a free tool for measuring the speed of your site.

GTmetrix subjects individual URLs to a range of tests developed by Google and Yahoo!, and presents the results in a detailed, comprehensive report complete with tips on how to improve your performance.

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Home Services Engine manages a massive, Gossamer Links-powered database of over 800,000 home service listings which allows its users to find the type of business they’re looking for in their neighborhood.

Delivering search results relevant to a user’s location quickly when you’re dealing with 7 gigabytes worth of listings from across the United States is no easy task, but Home Services Engine manages to return local businesses quickly and efficiently every time. Here’s how they do it, and how Gossamer Threads helped.

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