Is our website running slow?

pir

The other thing I'd say. It does seem all or nothing with people and this site and consistently all or nothing. It's not like I'm getting quick responses sometimes and slow the rest. Strange!

isofa

pir wrote: »

I would say no to a US site, not good at all if you use a top level domain. Search engines will assume you are in America which in most cases is a bad thing. Even if you want to be international with the TLD, it's still best to be assumed to be in the UK(Europe) where possible.

Haven't tried zen before but reseller account looks like a good deal. Mental note in case I need it.

Only thing I can say about 1and1 is it's hard to end a rolling contract with them but otherwise I think what you get is fine.

I'd like to know where the ecom engine came for the OP's site as I think it's the problem. The urls are horrible and unnecessary.

I couldn't recommend Zen enough, service, support and connections are all top notch, they are expensive, but we have it's important to our business, and we think it's well worth it. I also use them for a home office ISP, might cost £20 a month, but the connection is faultless, over 2 years I've had no downtime on email or adsl, very important when you are working off-site...

What if you keep the domains hosted on a UK company (like 123-reg) and just change the nameservers to point to a US host, would you get those issues then? This isn't my area of expertise (I read good things about http://www.bluehost.com/ )

I have a couple of gripes with 1&1, they mis-sold a server hosting service to us, essentially lying about the version and abilities, the refused to deliver their quote, giving a useless older version instead, then refused to cancel, it was an utter nightmare. They may be ok, providing you never terminate, but I've read a lot of horror stories about people cancelling and then getting chased for bad debt, and with their off-shore call centres. Getting to talk to a human with knowledge of the account was near impossible. So now I refuse to deal with a company if I can talk to someone direct, and preferably email too.

gibbyni

Hi Guys thanks for all the comments, just to give you some more info, were using 123reg E-Commerce package. We have been using it now since May, from the start it worked perfectly (speed wise). During Aug/Sept they did some upgrading on the servers i think it was and more recently the whole backend has changed layout.

We started noticing the problem around end of Aug and Emailed them, they said its working perfect on there end. We have emailed them again today with A link to this so that they cant just say its our computer or connection.

The thing that puzzling us is that for some people it works very fast but for others it takes ages to load, especially the first page. We have done a few things that 123reg say will speed up the cache on there servers but they where already set at near there optimum so cant see that it will make a big difference.

pir i will have a look for the bounce rate to so what i can find out

Thanks for everyone's help, if you have another ideas or notice anything strange please let me know

gibbyni

Bounce rate:
July - When we didnt have any problems 28.71%
Sept - A full month with problems 29.47%

pir

isofa wrote: »

What if you keep the domains hosted on a UK company (like 123-reg) and just change the nameservers to point to a US host, would you get those issues then? This isn't my area of expertise (I read good things about http://www.bluehost.com/ )

It doesn't matter where your domains have been registered, it's where your nameservers point to and with US hosting they will point to a location in the US which will mean search engines will assume you are an American website. It may not seem like a big deal but it is especially for SEO. There are ways around it but the best way is to host in your own country, it is worth the extra expense.

pir

gibbyni wrote: »

Bounce rate:
July - When we didnt have any problems 28.71%
Sept - A full month with problems 29.47%

That's a good bounce rate if most of your customers are coming from the search engines (rather than direct typed, check that out).

Your bounce rate hasn't really been affected so that suggests customers are not turning off which is good.

If you are serious about selling online you really need to consider getting in a professional to do the site. The free stuff is alright for a start but not great for a growing business and may explain why your site has so many fundamental issues with respect to what would be expected of a good site (simple stuff but very important is missing and will ultimately hold your business back from growing).

Check your stats, do your visitors come direct as in typing in the address, from google search (if so do they search for the kind of things that you would expect them to search for), paid links etc. This is all available in google analytics. If most of your traffic comes from google search then that's a good bounce rate. If it's a lot of direct typed, that means people know of your business and type it in and are more likely to tolerate the long load time as they know the business. You want people to come from the searches as selling your business directly and then getting them to check out the site can only take you so far.

BTW I'm assuming that you have your IP filters on in google analyitics that automatically discount your own IP address. Owners of sites frequently check the site so much so that if you include their IP address in the stats it with significantly skew the results so much so they are often meaningless. If your IP address is not filtered out you could be causing a lower bounce rate as you will be visiting lots of pages each time you log in to the back end.

I really think you need to consider a professional site (even a low end one). I noticed your location and have a few contacts in developing ecom sites that are local to you, I also know of government scheme in your area that may still be running and able to provide you with a good start with an ecom site. I can PM you details if you want.

TediousPhoenix

You may have to do some database optimisation, caching of queries, etc.

123-reg should have optimised the server settings, so I doubt the issue is there, although you'd be surprised how a poorly setup server will take to load pages.



Actually, just looked a bit more into it.

Firebug is saying that it's taking time to receive data, particularly:

http://www.wickedlyinnocent.co.uk/WebRoot/Store3/Shops/es119644_es124026009645/Styles/Start/StorefrontStyle_5.css

There are also several JS passing errors.

http://www.wickedlyinnocent.co.uk/WebRoot/Store3/SF/Styles/MileStones/StyleExtension.css

Get the Firebug extension for Firefox and investigate from here.

forever_broke_2

Just taken well over a minute here on 20mb b/band

As fr hosts have a look at 1&1, hubby is a developer and uses them for most of his clients

gibbyni

Just got an email back from 123reg saying this

The speed of the site is affected as you have Google Analytics added on the E Commerce package which means every page is tagged with code to collect data.

You can remove this function by changing the DNS for the domain back to directly pointing to the E Commerce server IP 94.136.40.185 in the Manage DNS page.

Im going to give that a try but will lose my analytics so that's a bit annoying but not the end of the world.

spud17

Less than 2 seconds with VM 10mbps, Firefox and low spec PC.

Just to add, didn't realise it could be relevant, using Noscript with Google analytics turned off.