Page Load Times (aaarggghh) HELP

How can i reduce the load times?

[HotelsAreme]

Hello,

I am not a web master but I am involved in a company on the internet who are trying to grow. We sell Hotels online and have thousands of hotel in a database. We advertise thru PPC channels and have thousands of "links" that go to our hotels.

For example, if you wanted to look for a specific hotel by name, you would find out ad and click on it.

We can see from our server times that our response is instant, between half a second and a second... but the time it takes to load for the customer is around 20 seconds (about 4 times longer than our competitors).

What factors could be effecting us and how can we improve this speed.

Our servers are in Italy and many of our customers are from the UK, could this effect it?

Is it the heavyness of the pages?

What factors contribute to high loading times?

Thanks
Helpless

[MatthewHSE]

What takes so long to load - images, text, or both?

Are your pages static, or dynamic?

My guess is that your pages are dynamically and the server isn't fast enough to serve them up quickly. If this is the case, optimizing your code or moving to a faster server could help.

[HotelsAreme]

Here I will show my ignorance!

Simply getting to the page takes a lot longer than the competitors. When it starts to download the images and text it is quick, say 2 seconds, it just takes a long time to get from a google adword to the stage where you start downloading the images.

How can i send you a link for you to see it for yourself?

[trillianjedi]

How many KB is an example page, including the images?

TJ

[HotelsAreme]

Its about 50

But some of the competitors site are heavier!

So i cant believe our site takes 4 times longer to load as the pages really arent that heavy.

[trillianjedi]

And how is that 50kb generated - is it a dynamic site?

[rocknbil]

50K including ALL images? That's **really** lightweight!

You can try taking the adSense code off to see if that's the issue.

If your layout is heavily table-based, some browsers will take time just rendering it, especially if you have many tables within tables.

[tedster]

And it's not just Adsense where someone else's server can cause trouble -- is there any place in the page code that calls out to any third party server, say for tracking purposes?

[cmarshall]

Fast servers ALWAYS help, but they aren't a substitute for efficient design.

"Efficient Design" is a fuzzy concept. It isn't stripped bare HTML anymore. It means the way that you design the pages.

For example, if your layout images are generally presented as background (like mine usually are), they will take longer to appear, but the main content will be presented more quickly.

As someone mentioned, embedded ads can KILL a page load.

Very often, the problem is with the DNS server. Make sure that your SOA server responds quickly. Many load-balancers use the "quick and dirty" method of redirecting DNS names. Even if you only have one server, a load balancer can still slow you down, because you need to go through the same circuitry.

There's some pretty smart people 'round here. I'm sure you'll get lots of suggestions.

[webjive81]

If you are using a database, your server could possibly have a heavy load. Start by output caching some of your primary pages (this will vary based on the type of server you are using). This should take a little stress off the server.

Also, try this website load tester tool. It provides a pretty decent analysis.

[websiteoptimization.com...]