Yup, I've been with them for years it's solid stuff. Also their support truly kicks ass. I don't need to deal with any technical stuff like server optimization. I just tell them to do it and I get a report in a couple hours.
Server Response Times and Other Bounce rate reducing shit
- Thread starter greenleaves
- Start date
Yup, I've been with them for years it's solid stuff. Also their support truly kicks ass. I don't need to deal with any technical stuff like server optimization. I just tell them to do it and I get a report in a couple hours.
Time on site is calculated by Google once the page loads via Analytics because it uses Javascript to calculate that. A slow loading site won't execute the javascript until it's loaded everything else, so a slow loading site won't increase time on site in any way whatsoever.
Are you saying... that if a person lands on your webpage, that even if it's not the topic they were looking for, they may click around, therefore increasing your bounce rate?
If a visitor lands on your website, and it's not the topic they were looking for, that means you have the wrong audience coming to your site. Your site is not targeted, and no matter how fast or slow your website is, they will bounce.
2nd. I think you think we are advocating a website with no content. A Complete blank site?? yeah, If I have a site with no content or images, the visits might bounce, but it will be super fast!!!
Please take a care full at what I am about quote:
No one said to remove all images or content from the site so it's completely useless.
You're usually on the right track with your comments, but then make a crazy comment, that a serious FacePalm.
Start thinking like a marketer/business owner. If you have a location with a bunch of people coming in and out of your store, no matter how long they stay, if they don't buy anything they are worthless. The speed of your site doesn't determine whether your site is relevant and has great content for the user. Your content, images, and videos do. I've got a site coming in above in the top 10%, throwing 1MB of info, with big images and videos at visitors, great content, low bounce rate, and it's super fast.
I am advocating compressing, and uses techniques to reduce the packet sizes, removing un-necessary plugins, and IF NEED BE social noise, that leads people to Facebook and twitter, and away from the goal of a website, to sell. It's all about the user experience on your website versus the competition. If you need social on your site, then have it.
You seem to have a mentality that if you reduce the amount of data going to a visitor, that also correlates to the visitor having a less richer experience, which is incorrect.
I didn't say that right. I compressed images, changed image formats (some jpgs with only 5 or so colors to gif), re-sized them so I'm not pulling in large images than necessary, and got rid of one or two, but they were not adding to conversions.
It is an ecommerce site; I know I need a good site. It is about 1mb, with tons of jquerry, images, and functionality.
But most sites in my niche have this. And most sites are relatively slow because they have this and aren't optimized, so I have a place to get another slight bit of edge. One yard at a time thing.
Wiredtree used to be really good to me, but I've had nothing but problems the last few months. I tried to work through the problems, but no mas.
My programmer told me Knownhost worked great for him, and so far it has been excellent.
I've been hosting since 2002. Hosts rise and fall. On the way up, they are awesome, on the way down they are not. Never believe a host is awesome just because they are on WHT all the time. In many cases, that's the host doing reputation management.
I have a quality site. According to analytics:
Pages / Visit: 6.84
Avg. Visit Duration: 00:02:58
Bounce Rate: 2.15%
% New Visits: 77.98%
The site was started a month ago and haven't entered into full promotion stage. We should see lower % of new visitors once we level off in about 12 months. First few months we have too much growth to use % of new visits stat without adjusting for traffic growth.
Test performed from: New York, NY
Resolved As: 108.160.xxx.xxx
Status: OK
Response Time: 1.541 sec
DNS: 0.189 sec
Connect: 0.002 sec
Redirect: 0.000 sec
First byte: 1.346 sec
Last byte: 0.004 sec
Size: 12732 bytes
-------------------
Test performed from: Munich, Germany
Resolved As: 108.160.xxx.xxx
Status: OK
Response Time: 1.900 sec
DNS: 0.143 sec
Connect: 0.102 sec
Redirect: 0.000 sec
First byte: 1.447 sec
Last byte: 0.207 sec
Size: 12732 bytes
We're doing some APC caching (not on that page), I am using MaxCDN and we have some cache control optimizations. No sprites or whatnot, we can get faster when it becomes important again.
I completely understood what you meant, i was using that as an example to markbush, because I think he thinks we are advocating removing images and stuff, when you stating you were simply compressing it. I was using that to highlight what you actually said, not what he thinks we are advocating. Greenleaves, you're completely on track.
This guy with, don't make your website too fast... ehhh..... not so much.
No, thats only one way - they don't need and use analytics for that - the data pool is not good enough too, there are to many site not using it - and thats not what analytics is done for - its a tracker for external sites and for external users.
Google owns a much better tracker you use with a very good chance every day - that one feeding their internal data and the WMT (wich are independent from analytics) - and the tracker its on their own website of course.
Open google.com in your browser, type in a keyword and check the source code. Do that with noscript or some java blocker enabled and not. You will see 2 different sources.
The SERPS page is by default full java driven - its an tracker on its own. If javascript is enabled you click the serps through java. Thats their tracker. They know when you click around on their results - and HOW you click too. Tracking internal the bounce rate by counting the time when you click through the results - thats their real bounce rate. If they really care.
The question is more - they really use bounce for ranking? Or only as a minor signal? They never told us really.
Google is counting clicks from you and all people clicking on a SERP results.
That data is the golden nugget. Adwords and all are just sitting on top of that (data).
Its technically very simply to check by session, browser and IP on their site your click speed in the SERPS.
You click, you see the result page, you go back to the SERPS and click the next result ...
Thats all trackable by google by nature - even side data from their other stats. People often thinks that google get only data by the calling of the serp page itself.
Google shows us not their real data - no one is doing that. They show us a filtered version. And analytics is a whole different thing which tracks the behaviour between you and the customer AFTER they got tracked by the SERP page.
Or, when you use something different as google to go to that page - thats also very, very valuable data for google - because they can't get that data on its own.
it loads asynchronously but I don't think it's actually initiated until the dom is ready for accuracy reasons
Nice to see a few of you guys running on KnownHost. I started with them about a year ago for a buddy and now just got my own VPS there. Every couple months they run promotions and you can get decent pricing.
If you are a complete nut for speed here are my suggestions:
- You can just load the page with the bare tags. Essentially nothing on the page except jquery. Then load the content with AJAX. Obviously your page will load instantly and then ajax will take a second or two to load up the site contents. Problem there is that you would need to create a site structure to allow bots to crawl since they can't see into AJAX (at least from what I know).
- Minify CSS / JS is good, but is that code optimized? Are you loading only what you really need? Is js optimized to use the LEAST code necessary?
- A big part of your on-page will be the amount of code you use. Lots of people use tons of tags to get the layout they need but really sometimes just a simple <h2> would have been enough. This would require someone with lots of HTML / CSS / JS experience to go through your site.
- Server location is huge. If you are testing one server to another that's easy enough. So SSH or whatever. There are a few data centers that have exceptional backbones (multiples) and because of that they are extremely fast.
- CDN; personally I use CloudFront and it works like a charm. However that is only for static content. CloudFlare has some pretty neat features which should help speed everything up.
- Apache is sluggish, Nginx better.
- Optimize queries that hit the db. Do your best to make sure they are all under 0.01 seconds.
If you are a complete nut for speed here are my suggestions:
- You can just load the page with the bare tags. Essentially nothing on the page except jquery. Then load the content with AJAX. Obviously your page will load instantly and then ajax will take a second or two to load up the site contents. Problem there is that you would need to create a site structure to allow bots to crawl since they can't see into AJAX (at least from what I know).
- Minify CSS / JS is good, but is that code optimized? Are you loading only what you really need? Is js optimized to use the LEAST code necessary?
- A big part of your on-page will be the amount of code you use. Lots of people use tons of tags to get the layout they need but really sometimes just a simple <h2> would have been enough. This would require someone with lots of HTML / CSS / JS experience to go through your site.
- Server location is huge. If you are testing one server to another that's easy enough. So SSH or whatever. There are a few data centers that have exceptional backbones (multiples) and because of that they are extremely fast.
- CDN; personally I use CloudFront and it works like a charm. However that is only for static content. CloudFlare has some pretty neat features which should help speed everything up.
- Apache is sluggish, Nginx better.
- Optimize queries that hit the db. Do your best to make sure they are all under 0.01 seconds.
This is going to be a problem for search engines. It's best to load the textual content and images regularly all the time. Never load the important stuff from ajax, you're going to lose your rankings. Especially in the minor search engines. Google's getting really good at reading ajax, but I wouldn't push your luck. Put the ads, and fancy stuff in ajax load, never the important content.
The trick is to disable javascript, and see what the search engines see on your site. If all the meat is there, you're fine. If you load a blank page... You went too far.
No doubt knownhost it's one lf the best...been using them for the last 3 years, and never had a problem....the support it's fucking awesome!
