Watch Your Speed

That is my conclusion for this week.

A few days ago I began noticing a drop in my traffic. Then I’ve started to try to find the bug.

First I’ve tested the latency of the server who’s hosting my website.

The results: 80% packet loss. That’s bad.

A tool that I have found helpful in determining how fast my site loads is offered by iWeb.
The results: almost 5 seconds for my site to load.

So .. finally I changed to another hosting server.
Packet loss: 0%
Load time: 0.7 seconds

What I’ve noticed:

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.

If you find that your site still loads slowly, then, the first thing to do is to check 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.

What’s your website load time?

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