I have a site with decent traffic (about 40k visitors per day) that is run off of GoDaddy shared hosting. I have been receiving a number of emails from visitors who have been complaining that the site is painfully slow. I know they're right - when I load it up on my work computer, it can take 15 seconds before anything appears on the screen... about 30 second to see all the text, and up to 45 seconds for the whole page. I'm wondering what's slowing it down. According to GoDaddy the traffic level is fine and it's not the server that's slowing things down. They tell me to re-examine the page, size of graphics, etc. The page is entirely static html - no java, no flash, no frames, no nothin'. Just text and graphics. And some adsense. The site does have a number of graphics on it - about 10-15 gifs per page and a jpeg header. All are optimized as well as I can get them without losing quality. The biggest graphic is the header @ 35k. Is this too big? The rest are mostly rectangles and whatnot @ about 4-7k. I use web-page maker to create the pages. Not the most complex piece of software, but it works for me. Beyond extremely basic html and wysiwyg editors, I really have minimal web design skills. I see other sites - with seemingly LOTS more graphics loading way way faster than mine. Why? Thanks in advance for any replies. P.S. If anyone is willing/interested, I'd be happy to PM you the url and maybe you can offer me some advice/suggestions/insight?
just use the yslow from yahoo. it gives you a really great report of things that makes your site slow.
If you have 40k in uniques per day, I would upgrade my hosting. Check with godaddy on your 'concurrent connection limits'.
Problem number one is your using GoDaddy for your hosting. Problem number two is your on a shared server. If your on a shared ip you can try getting a dedicated ip, that might help but I recommend changing host.
Hi, Add (YSlow Firefox) from this link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fi...pid=1&lver=3.5&atype=0&pp=20&pid=5&sort=&lup=
Thank you all for your help! I downloaded yslow. I hadn't heard of this program before and I think it's pretty helpful, though I admit I don't understand all of the jargon. I received all As, except for 3 categories "add expires headers" (no idea what those are), configure etags (huh?), and "use a CDN" (a what?). I need to recearch what these things are and try to figure out what theyre talking about. Maybe it's one of these three issues that's slowing my site??? Like I said, I use a wysiwyg web-page editor, so I'm no familiar with the coding jargon. I will look into these things though. Shared hosting - Several people seem to think that's the issue. Originally I was thinking the same thing, but GoDaddy tech support people don't think so. It's a big investment to upgrade, but I'd definitely do it if I thought it would work. Thoughts? Thanks everyone for the help - I do appreciate it.
Though its very difficult but if this problem still remain than its better to change the host . continuing with same host will result in decrease in traffic.anyways share your url with us.
hogwash, I have used godaddy hosting for years, its an amazing service, great support, very reliable. The slow loading is probably from the generated coding in the webpage maker. I would suggest letting an expert look at you HTML. These programs that generate code, usually do crummy jobs.
Some of the things that could have slowed down your site: 1. Your web host can't handle the amount of traffic your receiving, 40k a day is huge, you might want to upgrade your capacity or change your hosting site. 2. Your using too much graphics in a single page and have chosen the wrong format for it. Try to convert your images to .png format. Try also to limit the number of image to a minimum. 3. Your sites code also contributes to its speed, rule of the thumb is "the more the codes the longer it loads". Minimize the number of page shown on the home page to minimize loading. This article about optimizing site speed, well tell you additional ways to optimize your site speed. Best of luck
Well, I would certainly recommend that you follow up on the expires headers, learn about what they are how to set them, and learn about caching in general, you want things to get cached on your user's machines, that way all the graphics, scripts, css files, etc. don't have to re-download for every page view - making sure your site is getting cached properly is important, it can speed up loading times exponentially once users have loaded the page one time. I have never used GoDaddy, are you hosted on a Linux server or a IIS server? Really, you should give us the link and then we could actually offer useful suggestions rather than generalized guesses. It might also be worth looking into CSS sprites. What you can do is include all (or most) of your images in one larger image then just use background positioning in order to display only the portion of the larger image which contains the smaller one for a given location. This will reduce server requests and it will also eliminate some redundant data (because a portion of the data in any image format is only used for defining the format, to contain some additional info regarding the document, to define the beginning and the end of the image, etc., all of this info is included in each and every image file, so consolidating them can help, where possible, since then the file format info is only included once for the one large image). Of course CSS sprites are more appropriate on background images used for decoration, buttons, user-interface eleaments - for actual photos or images which are meant to be content this method is both impractical and unsemantic, but for presentation it is highly recommended. It is worth checking how images compress in different formats as well. Sometimes JPG will be larger than an identical PNG, sometimes vice versa, sometimes you will get the smallest file from a GIF or a PNG8. It all really depends on the colors, shapes, gradients, and patterns in the image how well it will compress using different methods. In the case of PNGs with alpha transparency you might consider using the PNG8 format with 4bit alpha (fireworks can output this format and it is an excellent means of reducing those larger PNG32/24s without losing the alpha trans) though this format is the least friendly to gradients so it is not suitable for certain images. Finally, as others have mentioned, WYSIWYG editors that produce HTML/CSS for you (like dreamweaver) are notorious for spitting out horribly sloppy code. I used dreamweaver's layout mode for years and never bothered learning HTML and CSS properly. Until at last I broke down and dove in. I learned to write HTML/CSS by hand in order to get around certain limitations of dreamweaver's layout mode, once I dove in though I realized how much time and energy I had wasted by not learning it sooner.. You really should learn to code web-pages by hand. It is really a very simple and straightforward process (far more so than using an editor to do the same thing). I still use dreamweaver, but I NEVER use layout mode. I just use it split screen to preview in the live view and edit in the code view. I do recommend a good code editor (dreamweaver's is quite excellent but not the only option, there are numerous good code editors available for free). A good code editor should give you autocomplete functionality which is incredibly useful when just learning the languages. Anyway, once you start hand-coding pages you will never look back. It will only take a week or two for you to have a solid grasp of the basics, and that is all you need. Because 90% of a page can usually be built using just the basics, and when you hit that spot you can't figure out, you can just do a quick search and find the solution. In this way you will be learning HTML/CSS at the same time as you are building the site and in the end it won't take much longer then using a WYSIWYG editor to layout the site, but you will be richer in knowledge and more skilled when you are done.