Website speed

[Ravenfire]

Im sure I read somewhere that your pages should open within a certain period of time otherwise people get fed up and go elsewhere. Does anyone know what those speeds should be please so I can test my pages? :D

[epiphany]

Just stick in "website speed test" into google and Bob's your Uncle! :D

[Rob Holmes]

7 seconds on a dialup connection to not lose many visitors (for the index page) :)

If you use Dreamweaver theres a little feature that tells you the load speed.

Hope this helps,

Rob

[TWD-Tony]

The time you are reffering to is the time you have to grab the attention of the visitor before they leave - approx 7 seconds :!:

Website speed is dependent on lots of different factors, here are just some of them...

Server Spec
Server Load
Server Connection(s)
Number of sites on the server (connected to server load).
General Network traffic.
Your ISP and it's routing ability.
Your connection speed / type
Your PC (or your visitors PC).
Type of website you have - static HTML pages load a lot quicker than dynamic pages (php for example) because dynamic pages require the accessing of a database to construct the page before it is served to visitors...

I have a speed test on my business hosting site which rates me approx 100 out of 250 in speed test results, now you may think that this is nothing to brag about - but I believe that in a shared hosting environment I am doing quite well and I dont mind publishing the results as they are 100% genuine... (I dont' claim figures that I can't backup :wink: )

Anyway - unless a site seriously times out then you are doing OK, you will only ever achieve blisteringly fast speeds with a dedicated server (and a good one at that)

[DuaneJackson]

Anyway - unless a site seriously times out then you are doing OK, you will only ever achieve blisteringly fast speeds with a dedicated server (and a good one at that)

Not true, you can still get very fast speeds on shared hosting with the right company.

[Ravenfire]

Am I right in saying a CMS is naturally slower to load than an HTML anyway? To me my site is fast to load but then I am on 2mb Broadband, which is know isnt the fastest but a lot faster than for someone on dial-up!

Not sure that mine will open within 7 secs on dialup (front page rather than forum) off to google now!

[DuaneJackson]

yep, a CMS would usually be a bit slower (not always noticably so) because of the database calls needed to get the content.

[Ravenfire]

Well either I am having connection problems this morning (which I think is very possible) or the front page of my site has gone realllly slow. I have tried Websiteoptimization.com and the results are as follows:-

14.4K 259.60 seconds
28.8K 130.20 seconds
33.6K 111.72 seconds
56K 67.35 seconds
ISDN 128K 21.18 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 2.57 seconds

Can someone check that for me on their connection please on my mumszone site to see if you get the same result

Thanks

[DuaneJackson]

for me it took at most a second for the text to appear and perhaps a further 2 secs max for the images to complete loading.

I don't think you have anything to worry about.

I am on a 512k cable connection I think (at home, it's 2meg in the office)

[TWD-Tony]

Works fine from here too (Manchester UK with a 3mb/s connection). If you are seeing slow connections whilst others are seeing good ones then the money is on a routing issue - either inside your ISP's internal network or between the ISP and the datacenter.

As for shared hosting being as quick as dedicated hosting then generally speaking you are incorrect - it cannot be, by nature a dedicated server will run faster and serve pages quicker than a shared hosting environment. It's a simple matter of resources available and concurrent connections to the server and SQL.
I do agree though that some hosts are better than others for shared hosting, the rule of thumb is that the cheaper hosts put more site's on a server hence the slower the server, while the more expensive hosts just put enough website's on a sinlge server and don't have to fill them to the brim to make a profit :wink: