Our site is slow..
-
We have noticed that our site is much slower than many of our competitors and expect that this is affecting our organic ranking.
We are on dedicated UK Fast server with
[20/08/2013 16:44:35] Tony Jackson: Operating System: CentOS 6 64-bit
CPU: 1x Intel Xeon E5-2620 @ 2.0GHz
Memory: 8x 8GB DDR3 RDIMM
Hard Drive: 4x 128GB SSD RAID10
[20/08/2013 16:46:28] Tony Jackson: Nginx, percona, tomcat/solr, Magento CE, cat: 25200 productsI could really do with your thoughts on this page for example
http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html
-
I am not a huge fan of APC at present (PHP PECL library, not the power battery company). Maybe nginx won't segfault like Apache has been for us.
As for the hosting, what I mean is to use a load balancer with multiple servers. Will you take some performance hit in getting DB data? Probably, but very little. But you're getting far worse now with Magento so it doesn't matter how fast your machine is (like I said, it's a beast so if it's not sitting at 0.01 almost all the time you've got major issues). Remember that this impressive machine is also a single point of failure. I had an impressive box running our DB once (multiple webservers) and the RAID controller crapped out in the middle of the day. We got back up under the two hour SLA but it cost us a lot of sales.
Now we run two webservers, a multi-AZ DB (automatic failover to secondary if master dies) and all behind a load balancer in AWS. I won't pretend this isn't without any issues (we wound up in an odd instance where the DB failover didn't work as expected) but it's a lot more redundant and scalable. I bet our setup is cheaper than your behemoth, too. Remember, you still have to chew through all the code each and every time the page is loaded (your problem is processing the individual thread, not horsepower). Splitting your site amongst multiple webservers means you have scalability as well.
-
Highland, Thank you for the response.
We are using memcached locally as it seems to give best results, having tried a combination of APC and memcached.
Would moving our database to a different server speed up the time to first byte(ttfp) as currently we sit with very little load on cpu? What would be the benefit?
Where you mention 'a cloud based solution' are you referring to using Cloudflare to sit in front of our server to act as a cdn and cache, or to move to a complete cloud based solution? I assume it is their Business package you refer to which gives the ddos and other protection.
Looking at Googles pagespeed tools, out ttfp seems to be the hold-up. which then just leaves the off site code (Snapenage, Comodo, etc) bringing up the last elements.
-
Thanks for this response.
We had been looking at Cloudflare and also at rearranging our server somewhat. Will let you know.
-
Magento is built on top of Zend Framework 1, a notoriously slow PHP framework. It also does some things that slow it down. Some thoughts...
- Be sure your use the Magento caching system.
- Move your database off to another machine. 25k products is a LOT
- Your hosting setup is monolithic. While your box is a beast of a machine (12 threads, 64GB RAM, 4x 128GB SSD) it's still susceptible to slow-down. I bet 50 concurrent users could bring it to its knees. While CDNs can help offload some of this, I recommend the beast with a cloud based solution. I bet you could get 2 or 3 servers plus a DB server for less than what you're paying for this one beast. Then put your machines behind a load balancer. So you would have multiple web servers serving your site up, a load balancer routing traffic to the fastest one and a common DB powering it.
- Switch to Cloudflare for your DNS. They will cache pages for you and they do it for free. They also add a layer of security.
- Use WMT to benchmark your site speed. It tells you the load time in a handy graph. Play around with it and see what happens.
-
We are using Magento on Nginxwth caching enabled with memcache
-
Generating the page seems to take very long. What shopping cart software are you using? Can it cache pages?
-
Thanks for your reply.
This page is a better example of our problem
http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html
-
Your website isn't that slow from London but there lots of things you can do to improve speed:
1. Use a CDN like NetDNA to host CSS, Javascript and images. By using a CDN, you will also increase the number of simultaneous (parallel) downloads since these files will be hosted on another (sub)domain.
2. You have lots of Javascript files. Try combining them into one file.
3. Add a cache header, this will instruct web browsers to cache your images, css and Javascript files. Simply add this to your .htaccess file:
AddType image/x-icon .ico
<ifmodule mod_headers.c=""># YEAR
<filesmatch ".(ico|gif|jpg|jpeg|png|flv|pdf)$"="">Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400"</filesmatch>WEEK
<filesmatch ".(js|css|swf)$"="">Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800"</filesmatch>
24 HOURS
<filesmatch ".(html|htm|txt|php)$"="">Header set Cache-Control "max-age=86400"</filesmatch></ifmodule>
======================================================
... and sorry for my english.
Hope that helps!
-
Yes had looked at GT Metrix though not paid much attention to YSlow. Will take a look now.
However it may be of more interest to look at the speed of this page rather than homepage;
http://www.pretavoir.co.uk/sunglasses/ray-ban-sunglasses.html
-
Hi Sean,
Your system looks pretty decent... I guess it depends on your traffic load though.
Have you checked out your results on GTMetrix.com?
You scored well in the PageSpeed testing, but not in YSlow. I'd take a look and see if you could leverage some of the suggestions there.
Hope this helps.
Mike
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Problem on my site
Hello, thank you for guiding me
Competitive Research | | kaajshop 0
I had a problem with the speed of the site. I do not know how to solve this problem
this page:https://kaajshop.com/cat/700 -
Can deceptive ads help sites to rank? Pogosticking effect involved...
Hello,
Competitive Research | | fablau
I have a question for you. I have noticed that many music sites that appear in the first top results for keywords our users search for, include all the same ads that deceive people by inviting them to "Download" or get the "Full Album" of what people may be search for. Look at the following websites that are often displayed at the first spots for keywords like "Christmas Sheet Music" (just an example): [....] They all have, most of the times, the same ads. Look at the following screenshots taken from the sites above (the ads are at the top of the page): http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot1.jpg
http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/storage/google/Shot2.jpg Those deceptive ads could engage users more than legitimate websites not showing those ads or not showing ads at all, making Google think that people are more engaged on those website showing those deceptive ads. If it is quality that Google is looking for, shouldn't they do something to avoid having sites ranking well just because of some deceptive ads that take users into action, but without any useful result? I am eager to know your ideas on this issue. Thanks! Fab.0 -
How on earth is this site ranking so highly?
I'm trying (& struggling) to rank for the keyword property in italy. Yet in the past 5 weeks I've seen this site -- betterpropertyitaly (dot) com -- rocket from about #30 to #2 for the keyword and am trying to figure out why. The obvious is that it's in the domain name, but that can't be the be-all-and-end-all, surely? It's a 2 yr 9 mth old site, so why the sudden spurt? I look in Open Site Explorer and the metrics look pretty weak: Domain Authority: 17 Page Authority: 29 Linking Root Domains: 9 Absolutely zero social shares. Good luck to him and all -- but I'm trying to figure out what he's doing right and I'm not. My site apart, he's beating some pretty big-hitters.
Competitive Research | | Jeepster0 -
Why is this site ranking #1?
I've done extensive research into http://www.maggiesottero.com/ and cannot come up to any definitive conclusions as to why this site is ranking #1 for the term "wedding dresses." The page is not optimized for the keyword. **Any thoughts? **
Competitive Research | | craigsmith3330 -
Keyword based link problem on site
So I think I might have identified an issue with a site that I'm trying to get ranked for a specific keyword but, wanted to get some opinions before I started making some big changes on the site. On my homepage I have the keyword that I would like to be ranked for in the title lets say "Blue Widgets - Company Name', also on the home page I have some descriptions of our services including the keywords. I also have a couple of the keyword based links within in the content, navigation and footer. But these keyword based links all point to another page on the site: blue-widgets.htm. If I really want my home page to rank for the keyword "Blue Widgets' should all of these links point to the home page instead of the sub page? I know there are a great number of other factors that contribute to rankings but looking at my competition, this is something that they seem to be doing. The keyword based links within the content, navigation or footer all point to the homepage. I also have a higher Domain Authority than some of the sites that rank higher than me so I'm not sure if building more links is the answer. Of course I always want to build natural links but these sites don't seem to be doing that either. Any comments, suggestions or input would be greatly appreciated.
Competitive Research | | TRICORSystems0 -
Best place to view referral traffic on a third party site?
What is the best site / tool to use to view referral traffic on a third party site?
Competitive Research | | nicole.healthline0 -
Are there any tools to extract keywords and long tail keywords from a site and report keyword density by URL?
I need a tool that does the following: Find exact matches for keywords in content of sites and report keyword density by URL. Then identify the value generated by a particular keyword.
Competitive Research | | MotionPoint0 -
Is There Video Instruction on How To Use SEOMoz and Open Site Explorer?
Hi I have just signed up to use this software and would like to know how to use it properly. Is there a video tutorial on how to get the most out of the tools? I want to get the competition's backlinks but for some reason it's not openiing the page. I also want to know how the backlinks are assessed to find the real quality ones that I can link to. How are the backlinks assesed and what standards are used to asses backlink quality? Thank you Sunil.
Competitive Research | | sunilmuse0