Are Fasthosts slowing down my site loading time?

[Sarah_BlueFox]

I hope this is the right place to put this. I've noticed that my website is very slow to load but I only notice this during the week. At weekends it doesn't seem too bad (only a few seconds compared to more than 10 seconds on weekdays).

This leads me to think that it's the server my site is hosted on that is the issue rather than something on my website (I may be wrong but am posting here to see if others think that could be the case or if I'm overlooking something).

I try and use optimised images (in fact I don't think my site is overly image-heavy) and I don't have stacks of pages, and not a huge amoutn of wordpress plugins. I started a thread on LinkedIn Wordpress Experts and got lots of advice, unfortunately most of it was a bit too tecchie for me! Am not a tecchie person though I have a basic understanding of html, how websites work etc...

I have contacted my webhost (fasthosts) and am awaiting an answer. In the meantime, has anyone else had issues similar to this?

thanks!

 

[Max Brzezicki]

Hi,

You are most probably right... have you tried Google Developers Service to measure the performance of your website loading? They will point out what is slowing it down...
https:// developers. google. com /speed/pagespeed/?hl=en

(I can't post links yet, but you'll figure it out!)

 

[fisicx]

More likely it's because you are on cheap shared hositng (with 2700 websites).

When your site loads you can see it hanging as all the stylesheets and scripts fire up and activate. But the biggest block is time to first byte. Fasthosts (and 1and1) are a little tardy.

Pay a little more and you can get a far better service.

 

[Sarah_BlueFox]

Thanks Max, I'll take a look at that.

Yes Fisicx, it doesn't cost too much to host a site with them, unfortunately I'm on a budget! Do you recommend any other hosts?

 

[fisicx]

Dan at Hi Hosting (a member here) does a good deal and seems to have a good reputation.

You might have a small budget but if a slow site is losing you business paying £30 more per year is a good investment.

And the site has a number of problems as well which aren't helping - join the forum as a full member and get it reviewed.

 

[Sarah_BlueFox]

Max, thanks so much for sharing Google Developers Service. I've run my site through this and can see where a lot of the issues are.

I've renabled W3 Total Cache (I used it once before and it broke my site meaning I had to work out how to go into the FTP manager to resolve it. Still, a good lesson as I know I can stop panicking too much if I do get the white screen of death in future!!).
My site has gone from 50/100 to 73/100 on Google Developers. Not great but going in the right direction, so some work still to do.

Still waiting to hear back from Fasthosts...

 

[fisicx]

w3 total cache cause more problem than it solves.

And most of the suggestions from the Google insites aren't much use. Putting your CSS in the header for example just isn't practical and goes against all good design principle.

The hosting is the biggest stumbling block.

 

[LowPrices.uk]

It is likely to be an issue with the server resources. I guess it's fair to give Fasthosts a chance to fix it and see what they say. However, if it is not resolved to your satisfaction I would suggest switching hosts. Fasthosts can at times be poor.

I suggest moving to Clook Internet or Vidahost instead.

 

[NuBlue]

Another tool you can use to check performance is http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/. To prove to Fasthosts how performance degrades during the week, run a few test every day and note the summary results.

 

[Ian J]

It is likely to be an issue with the server resources. I guess it's fair to give Fasthosts a chance to fix it and see what they say. However, if it is not resolved to your satisfaction I would suggest switching hosts. Fasthosts can at times be poor.

I suggest moving to Clook Internet or Vidahost instead.

There are several forum members who offer excellent hosting packages at budget prices and you would do much better moving to one of them rather than the bigger, more well known names.

I see that you recommend Vidahost but I found them very slow and not using state of the art technology either so I moved my blog away from them to Dan at Hi Hosting (or rather Dan moved it for me) and it now loads up far quicker

 

[Sarah_BlueFox]

Fasthosts reply was
"On our shared hosting servers, you are sharing the resources with other users and from time to time performance may degrade slightly through due to high load or badly written or malicious scripts. Obviously this can have a detrimental effect on the speed of the server and on other users which is why we monitor our severs closely to minimise this where possible..

Unfortunately we cannot predict as and when this will happen and I cannot guarantee that it will not happen in the future due to the nature of shared hosting. As previously stated however we do act as soon as we become aware of a problem.

If this type of platform does not meet the performance you require, then it may be worth looking at moving to a dedicated server where you are not sharing resources with anyone and you can manage your server as you wish, however this will require knowledge of server administration."

So basically, you share with lots of other people who might have rubbish websites that suck up the space/bandwidth. Put up with it. And as for moving to a dedicated server - I'm a freelancer for goodness sake! Like I need a dedicated server or have server admin knowledge..

Think I'll be looking into other hosts - thanks everyone for the tips and support!

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Dan at Hi Hosting (a member here) does a good deal and seems to have a good reputation.

You might have a small budget but if a slow site is losing you business paying £30 more per year is a good investment.

There are several forum members who offer excellent hosting packages at budget prices and you would do much better moving to one of them rather than the bigger, more well known names.

I see that you recommend Vidahost but I found them very slow and not using state of the art technology either so I moved my blog away from them to Dan at Hi Hosting (or rather Dan moved it for me) and it now loads up far quicker

Thanks for the recommendations guys.

Yes, you'll find the same thing with all of the very large hosts, they simply cram too many users on poor performing servers, leading to unresponsive, slow loading websites, and ultimately lower sales and conversions, as well as lower search engine ranking potentially.

As @fisicx alluded to, hosting is an investment, not a cost. Even if you're on a budget, it doesn't make sense for anybody other than a hobbyist to skimp on quality hosting, as you'll just get lower returns. Less happy visitors, poorer search engine performance, and ultimately less sales and conversions.

Much like a business owner that isn't a natural word smith writing their own copy rather than using a professional copywriter .

You don't necessarily need to pay any more for much better hosting though, as typically with the very large hosts half of what you're paying is just going to advertising - £3 spent with one of the big names isn't the same as £3 spent with a smaller provider. And naturally a larger provider can't provide the same personal level of support.

Provided you're with a good web host though, then going for a high performing package if it's in your budget can really make a difference.

That's why some hosts provide eCommerce hosting and other higher performance packages, so you don't have to jump from web hosting to a VPS or dedicated server.

I hope that helps.

Best of luck,

Dan

 

[webhostuk]

Most likely there shared server might be overstuffed if they are offering unlimited resources. The best thing is to look for a provider who does not offers unlimited space & bandwidth such shared hosting provider shall surely offer you better performance than the unlimited ones.

 

[ukwebhosting]

Hi Sarah,

From your description it definitely sounds like the server they host you on is overloaded and it is showing that at the peak times.

You could use the tools other posters have mentioned to gather some proof to the load times etc at different times like you mentioned and show them to your host and give them a chance to do something about it.

Failing that or if they are not forthcoming with a resolution have a look around for another host.

It is a good idea to also give prospective hosts a call and have a chat about what you need, that way you can really get a feel for them, will you be a valued customer or just another number? do they know their stuff? that sort of thing.

If you do decide to move hosts, do your research before jumping out of the frying pan into the fire

Thanks

Paul

 

[LowPrices.uk]

Yes I would say best to move hosts. Not all shared hosting is bad. For example, I'm on shared hosting with Clook and have never had any site availability problems.

 

[ryedale]

As nublue said, it's worth having a look at your site on Pingdom as that will tell you where the bottlenecks are. If you want to pop the link up on here or PM it to me, I'll be happy to have a look at it for you.

 

[RichardfromOquile]

Checking just now (10:45 24th Feb) your site starts to load very slowly (first response received after 8 secs). This could be the server (host) or the way the site has been set-up.

While the host may be at fault, your site needs attention. The appearance is fine but the way it is built/configured is not. A good host will improve things but only to some extent.

Get someone to properly assess your site. As you are using wordpress you should find someone with experience of that system.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Funny that you just posted in this thread from back in November (guess it came up in a search?), because as it happens Sarah's actually just signed up with us, and she's building a new WordPress website with us, addressing both the site and the slow hosting.

Thanks for choosing us @Sarah_BlueFox, best of luck with your new website

If you need any help then just get in touch in the normal way.

All the best,

Dan

 

[RichardfromOquile]

@Dan_HiHosting Glad to hear both sides of it are being looked at.

I didn't even realise it was an old post, not sure how I ended up on it!

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

By the way, regarding the "starts to load very slow" that's simply because of the server. I just received an almost 20 second load time, almost 15 of which were spent waiting for the server to respond:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dHGXBg/bluefoxcopywriting.co.uk

So while rebuilding the site and optimising it is a good idea, the immediate issue was that Fast Hosts simply appear to have ridiculously overcrowded servers, that simply don't respond in any reasonable time.

Unfortunately this is quite common, especially with the very large commercial hosts. It's a case of overselling to increase profits, and relying on marketing to win new business rather than referrals from happy customers.

Yes, I think it's a great move by Sarah to look at both the website and hosting

 

[Sarah_BlueFox]

Just a quick update! thanks for all the responses/replies.

Yes, I have finally moved the site to Hi Hosting and am really pleased with the support that Dan has provided - he's answered all my (probably stupid!) questions quickly and patiently. He even helped when I managed to lock myself out of my admin panel which is going way above and beyond what I'd expect of a host! I'd definitely recommend Hi Hosting.

Also I've made some changes to the site to hopefully optimise it and help it run a bit quicker. I'm not a developer /designer so am sure there are things that could be improved, but think I'll stick to writing and leave the technical stuff to the experts in future...

 

[ryedale]

Glad to hear you got sorted

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

Just a quick update! thanks for all the responses/replies.

Yes, I have finally moved the site to Hi Hosting and am really pleased with the support that Dan has provided - he's answered all my (probably stupid!) questions quickly and patiently. He even helped when I managed to lock myself out of my admin panel which is going way above and beyond what I'd expect of a host! I'd definitely recommend Hi Hosting.

Also I've made some changes to the site to hopefully optimise it and help it run a bit quicker. I'm not a developer /designer so am sure there are things that could be improved, but think I'll stick to writing and leave the technical stuff to the experts in future...

Thanks for your kind words Sarah, I'm glad you're pleased with our service .

Helping clients like you have a proper web site and platform to grow your business is really rewarding.

Your website load time has also gone from 5-10 second load times (and I even recorded a 20 second load time before), to under half a second now:
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dknKF2/www.bluefoxcopywriting.co.uk

Your website now loads faster than 98% of all tested websites.

So that should really help and let you focus on your business

Best of luck,

Dan

 

[Thomas Harvey]

Something to add to just squeeze the most out of it, run your images through a plugin like EWWW Image Optimizer. It'll save you 13kb on the homepage alone.

 

[fisicx]

Or even better, use this: https://compressor.io/compress

You can save a lot more than 13Kb - just the background image reduces by 31% (36kb).

 

[Thomas Harvey]

You can save a lot more than 13Kb - just the background image reduces by 31% (36kb).

Is that using lossless or lossy though?

 

[fisicx]

Lossy. And the image looks fine with that compression.

 

[Thomas Harvey]

Lossy. And the image looks fine with that compression.

Well that's the difference between what I suggested and what you suggested then. I offered something that wouldn't compromise quality but could be done in bulk and yours would be individual pages done by hand.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

You can also save the images from Google PageSpeed.
I always start by using an appropriate image format and size, with good compression, removing any unnecessary meta data and saving for web.

Then run PageSpeed or similar, to find ways to optimise the site and compress the images further.

You can then run an accelerator like JetPack Photon or the plugin @Thomas Harvey suggested, although I must admit I'm not familiar with that one.

If your images are well encoded/compressed, you use an accelerator, and your web host uses compression, then you've got performance covered for your media on all levels. Of course you can use a full CDN as well.