Is your slow website turning away customers?

You got traffic. Yay!

You’ve built your website, you did your SEO and social media marketing, and you’re starting to see visitors. Great!

Or will the traffic cause problems?

But there are considerations that you must make if the number of visitors starts to rise. Is your website optimized to handle the load? How many of your visitors are leaving your website because it’s just too darn slow?

And what about this?

Let’s say your web designer does some changes and all of a sudden the site starts to run slow. Why? What caused it?

And unfortunately, he did a LOT of changes over the past day, doesn’t know which action caused the problem.

He could change one variable at a time and check, but that’s not really a good solution. Certainly it’s time consuming. And if he’s billing you… well, you know where that leads.

Let’s give you an example.

Let’s say you have a single image on a webpage. This image is 30KB. Small, right? But let’s say that image is requested 100,000 times over a month (unique requests). That means 3.0GB of transfer, right?

But if you could optimize that image down to 7KB, it would only be 0.7GB of transfer. That’s a savings of 2.1GB of bandwidth over one month.

And that’s just one image.

Can this really happen?

Certainly. Let’s say you have 500 visitors to your website/day. You have 3 problem images, 1 ‘weather tracker’ on your navbar, and fancy dynamic menu system. That’s 5 problems of, say, 2GB each over a period of one month. That’s 10GB transfer that you didn’t have to do. Now, let’s say you have 5 websites. That’s 50GB of transfer. And while it’s true that disk space is cheap, but that still doesn’t help you with bandwidth issues.

So, now you have to test.

Isn’t going to the website and seeing if it’s fast enough, good enough?

No. If you’re reading this article, you’ve probably invested in a zippy connection. So what may load fine for you may not load fast for your customers. People can have different connection speeds.

You might have things cached. However, you can’t just clear your cache and say, “Yeah, it’s running fine.” Besides, that just gives you an overall load speed, anyway. What if it’s one component that’s causing the problem, or a mixture of components like we talked about above?

So, what’s the solution?

Pingdom to the rescue.

You use an outside tool that bypasses all your browser and Internet connection variables, like Pingdom.

Pingdom is used to monitor and test website speed. It will show you a breakdown of all the components in a handy graph.

You can also view it over time.

And, of course, you can monitor website speed over time.

Note the graph to the right shows how the speed of the website changes over time.

But Pingdom does much more than that.

Pingdom is a suite of tools all rolled into one. The overall goal is to make sure that your website runs optimally.

• Uptime reports. If you signup for Pingdom, you can monitor a website on the hour, or minute. It’s free for one website, and pretty cheap for a few. If you have multiple websites, it’s a handy report to have. So, if you discover your website is running slow, you don’t know right away how long it’s been that way. With this tool, you do.
• Email, text & twitter alerts. If you’re the techno-geek in your company, and the website starts running slow, you can setup alerts to throw an email (or even a text message) at you. That way, you can spot the problem before your boss does. There’s even a free desktop and iPhone app so you can monitor in many ways.
• 

  Did Pingdom work? Yes!

  Error analysis. Let’s say a Pingdom check fails. It will immediately perform additional tests – from different locations around the world (multiple check locations). This helps Pingdom root out localized errors (a t1 line is down somewhere in NYC, so it tests in Sweden instead (and does a traceroute). So Pingdom doesn’t just tell you there’s a problem, it tries to figure out where the problem is.

So, does it work?

Yep. We originally found this tool because we were having problems on our own site.

The result: we cut our response time in half with six small changes. And Pingdom helped us do that easily!

And for the price – it’s a steal.

Further Reading.

• 6 Ways to Speed Up Your Site