Website Performance (or People are Impatient).

Way back when I used to host this server myself on the end of my tenuous ADSL connection loading up the web site always felt like something of a gamble. There were any number of things that could stop me (and the wider world) from getting to it like: the connection going down, my server box overheating or even the power going out at my house (which happened more often than I realised). About a year ago I made the move onto my virtual private server and instantly all those worries evaporated and the blog has been mostly stable ever since. I no longer have to hold my breath every time I type my url into the address bar nor do I worry about posting media rich articles anymore, something I avoided when my upstream was a mere 100KB/s.

What really impressed me though was the almost instant traffic boost that I got from the move. At the time I just put it down to more people reading my writing as I had been at it for well over a year and a half at that point. At the same time I had also made a slight blunder with my DNS settings which redirected all traffic from my subdomains to the main site so I figured that the burst in traffic was temporary and would drop off as people’s DNS caches expired. The strangest thing was though that the traffic never went away and continued to grow steadily. Not wanting to question my new found popularity I just kept doing what I was always doing until I stumbled across something that showed me what was happening.

April last year saw Google mix in a new metric to their ranking algorithm: page load speed, right around the same time that I experienced the traffic boost from moving off my crappy self hosting and onto the VPS. The move had made a significant improvement in the usability of the site, mostly due to the giant pipe that it has, and it appeared that Google was now picking up on that and sending more people my way. However the percentage of traffic coming here from search engines remained the same but since it was growing I didn’t care to investigate much further.

I started to notice some curious trends though when aggregating data from a couple different sources. I use 2 different kinds of analytics here on The Refined Geek the first being WordPress.com Stats (just because it’s real-time) and Google Analytics for long term tracking and pretty graphs. Now both of them agree with each other pretty well however the one thing they can’t track is how many people come to my site but leave before the page is fully loaded. In fact I don’t think there’s any particular service that can do this (I would love to be corrected on this) but if you’re using Google’s Webmaster Tools you can get a rough idea of the number of people that come from their search engine but get fed up waiting for your site to load. You can do this by checking the number of clicks you get from search queries and comparing that to the number of people visiting your site from Google Analytics. This will give you a good impression of how many people abandon your site because it’s running too slow.

For this site the results are quite surprising. On average I lose about 20% of my visitors between them clicking on the link in Google and actually loading a page¹. I shudder to think how many I was losing back in the days where a page would take 10+ seconds to load but I’d hazard a guess it was roughly double that if I take into account the traffic boost I got after moving to a dedicated provider. Getting your site running fast then is probably one of the most important things you can do if you’re looking to get anywhere on the Internets, at least that’s what my data is telling me.

After I realised this I’ve been on a bit of a performance binge, trying anything and everything to get it running better. I’m still in the process of doing so however and many of the tricks that people talk about for WordPress don’t translate well into the Windows world so I’m basically hacking my way through it. I’ve dedicated part of my weekend to this and I’ll hopefully write up the results next week so that you other crazy Windows based WordPressers can benefit from my tinkering.

¹If people are interested in finding out this kind of data from their Google Analytics/Webmasters Tools account let me know and I might run up a script to do the comparison for you.