About a month ago I began noticing a drop in traffic on my programming site. It wasn’t a sharp drop, but a very slow decline. I didn’t understand why until I went on a business trip and had to use the hotel wi-fi connection. Every other site on the net was loading quickly, but mine was much slower.
After talking with a few of my members, I discovered I wasn’t the only one experiencing sluggish page loads, it was everyone. So, I began the search for a new dedicated server. The one I had was a Dual 2.4Ghz Xeon server with 2GB of RAM. There were about 50 other sites on the server including 2 or 3 large sites. The average load was 2-3. If you know much about servers, a load of 1+ will start to slow down your pages. I decided I needed a truly dedicated box, with more RAM, and faster hard drives. I also wanted something with RAID for peace of mind. Brian from HondaSwap.com suggested SoftLayer.com. They had a really good selection of servers, with RAID, for a descent price. I chose the Dual Opteron 248 with 3GB of RAM and 3 73GB 10k RPM SCSI HDDs in a RAID 5 array. Not much faster than my old server, but does give me the option to upgrade to the dual core Opteron 270 at a later date.
The server was provisioned a few hours after I ordered it, and after about 2 weeks of testing, I moved my site last weekend. It’s only been a few days, but I’ve already noticed an increase in traffic, page views, and ad revenue. What does that mean? Simple:
Slow Servers = Less Traffic, or more importantly, Faster Servers = More Money
The move itself is a totally different story. I had to mod_rewrite 220,000 pages and change the entire linking structure. Read more about that in my next blog entry.
by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com
It also goes beyond the actual user experience. The search engines and the traffic they send you is also affected by the speed of your website. Your sites doesn’t even have to be very slow for this to take affect.
I often see that speed and performance isn’t given as much thought as it should. That’s too bad since many are probably missing out on traffic because of this.
[...] 9. Website Speed Tester – I know personally how much the load time of a website impacts the success of that website, and I have seen on more than one occassion where I have moved a site of mine previously under a high load to a new server with a lighter load and search engine rankings improve along with traffic. Here is a quote from a Guest Contributor on this blog, “The server was provisioned a few hours after I ordered it, and after about 2 weeks of testing, I moved my site last weekend. It’s only been a few days, but I’ve already noticed an increase in traffic, page views, and ad revenue. What does that mean? Simple: Slow Servers = Less Traffic, or more importantly, Faster Servers = More Money“. It is true that search engines and end users DO NOT like slow loading sites. A tool that I have found helpful in determining how fast my site loads is offered by iWeb. [...]
[...] Page Rank used to be much more respected, but people quickly learned how to “game” page rank and it went downhill from there. It got to the point where PR6, PR7, and PR8 links were being sold for big bucks even though they were “junk sites”. 9. Website Speed Tester – I know personally how much the load time of a website impacts the success of that website, and I have seen on more than one occassion where I have moved a site of mine previously under a high load to a new server with a lighter load and search engine rankings improve along with traffic. Here is a quote from a Guest Contributor on this blog, “The server was provisioned a few hours after I ordered it, and after about 2 weeks of testing, I moved my site last weekend. It’s only been a few days, but I’ve already noticed an increase in traffic, page views, and ad revenue. What does that mean? Simple: Slow Servers = Less Traffic, or more importantly, Faster Servers = More Money“. It is true that search engines and end users DO NOT like slow loading sites. A tool that I have found helpful in determining how fast my site loads is offered by iWeb. If you find that your site loads slowly, there are a variety of things that you need to do to take action. The first two things I always recommend are checking the size AND number of graphics (images) on your pages. You should always have the WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes specified and you should never bog your pages down with numerous graphics, especially those that aren’t compressed and take forever to load. The second things you should consider is your hosting platform. Are you on a shared plan, taking the inexpensive route, where you can be on a server with dozens or even hundreds of other sites? The cost to upgrade to a better hosting solution is likely going to have a big ROI longterm. Don’t be hesitant to fork over the dollars now, when ultimately you are costing yourself money by waiting. [...]
yes, softlayer.com is a good choice for unmanamged dedicated hosting services
[...] 9. Website Speed Tester – I know personally how much the load time of a website impacts the success of that website, and I have seen on more than one occassion where I have moved a site of mine previously under a high load to a new server with a lighter load and search engine rankings improve along with traffic. Here is a quote from a Guest Contributor on this blog, “The server was provisioned a few hours after I ordered it, and after about 2 weeks of testing, I moved my site last weekend. It’s only been a few days, but I’ve already noticed an increase in traffic, page views, and ad revenue. What does that mean? Simple: Slow Servers = Less Traffic, or more importantly, Faster Servers = More Money“. It is true that search engines and end users DO NOT like slow loading sites. A tool that I have found helpful in determining how fast my site loads is offered by iWeb. [...]