I believe this would be the right place for this topic. I am having some big issues with Google's crawling speed. Here are my numbers: Time spent downloading a page (in milliseconds) High: 4,825 Average: 2,028 Low: 47 That is a very, very high average from research that I have done. How in the world do I go about getting that number down to around 800ms or better? I am on a shared server, so I know that will slow down the process some. And I believe I have fairly well optimized my site (at least as much I can). What else can I do to get this number to go down? My website is in my signature if you would like to check it out. I don't think it is very slow..I'd say at least average. I am using WordPress. Thanks, Thomas
You can get a dedicated server, but that's expensive. Or you can complain to your hosting provider and ask them what they can do for you. Closer to home, you need to figure out what's causing the slow load. Are other sites on the same server loading as slowly? Then you probably do need to move to another server. Most typically, most load time is wasted on separate HTTP requests for for external objects such as javascripts, stylesheets, and images. If you are technical you can use various techniques for eliminating needless HTTP requests (but then you would not be asking this question). But start by looking for simple causes and chances are you'll figure something out. Is your site image-heavy? Reduce the number of images and their size. You can optimize images by converting them to png.
Philip, How would I go about checking to see if other sites on my server are running slow? I'm interested to see if that is what is causing the problem. I have been optimizing my site for the past 3 weeks, but the time to download a page keeps rising.
http://myipneighbors.com/ -- right now it's temporarily down, possibly for maintenance, but I am sure it will come back up soon. It might be inefficient to optimize blindly. You can use this tool to see which objects are taking the longest to load, and deal with them individually: http://tools.pingdom.com/