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
-
Finding most popular sites within a category - who offers that information?
Hello Mozzers - I am researching the most popular sites within a category - are there any services that identify the most popular sites within a category - I noticed Alexa do offer a service but I have no idea who else offers such a service (Majestic, perhaps?). Thanks in advance, Luke
Competitive Research | | McTaggart0 -
Open Site Explorer Twitter and Facebook Links
I was using Open Site Explorer to compare some of my site's links to a competitor and I noticed that my Twitter page is not counting as an incoming link, whereas theirs are. From what I can tell, we have the same kind of setup on my twitter page, listing the domain in the company information... but no luck. Any suggestions on what I may be able to change? For reference: twitter.com/mediamegamall ... I know I need to work on the twitter presence... one thing at a time 🙂
Competitive Research | | Ask_MMM0 -
Spam affiliate outranking quality site?
I purchased a site hotkeyit.com which was making decent revenue without much work (all via PPC or CPM) but then afterwards started looking at the SERPs and realized I was being outranked for the main term, 'starcraft 2 guide/s' by crappy ClickBank sites like starcraft2guide.com and many others. Researching starcraft2guide.com specifically in SEOMoz/Rush/Majestic shows hotkeyit.com as being quite superior in everyway, not to mention it has quite a social following for a small gaming site, yet Google seems to care not. Can someone please explain what's going on here? It seems like the site was penalized, but there was never any link building done for it aside from word of mouth on forums (this was mentioned beforehand). Thank you everyone.
Competitive Research | | Neyzio0 -
Identify keywords certain sites target
Hello, I've been asked to identify what keywords a group of blogs/communities might target so that we might gain some insight for our own SEM purposes. It's been several years since I used SEOmoz's tools, so they have changed a lot. I couldn't remember if you had such a tool, but it appears you do not--or at least not that I am finding. I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of such a tool where I can input a subdomain, and have a report stating which keywords are the ones the domain rates highly for. To be clear: I'm not looking for a traffic estimation or anything; simply a breakdown of what keywords a specific page or domain support most. P.S. I did a search on here for certain terms like "competitive keyword targets" and so forth, and saw no matching QA. I'm sorry if there is a duplicate! Thanks,
Competitive Research | | krisgosser
Kris0 -
Analyzing Back Links - Says site A has back link to Site B but when I look at site B I can't find any back link to Site A. Why?
I am new to SEO Moz - It looks like incredible technology. I was playing around with different websites to see where they had back linked to see how it works. Looked at a site called racingsecretsexposed [dot] come and it said that it had dozens of links to www.ndesignstudio.com such as: ndesign-studio.com/blog/best-wordpress-sites?replytocom=893 with link anchor text "laying horses" but when I do a search for the company name, or the anchor text "laying horses", or the owner of the company's name on ndesignstudio.com - nothing appears. Why not? Isn't the back link anchored by the text laying horses, which should link back to the racing secrets website? Thanks
Competitive Research | | NewtoSEO900 -
How to check the Pr and Da of a thousand sites
Hi, I have a list of a thousand sites. I want to qualify the sites based on Pr and Da so that I can do my outreach. Pls advice how this can be done without manually putting each site in ose. Cheers, Vishal
Competitive Research | | vishalkhialani0 -
How can my site not ranked on easy keyword while it currently ranked 1 on difficult keyword??
The site in question is http://ikt.co.id The site is perfectly optimized (or even over optimized) for keyword "Bikin Website Murah" (in Indonesia it means "develop an affordable website") currently if you search on both google.co.id AND google.com, it ranked on #10 (on google.co.id) and it ranked on #7 (on google.com), and both term only return 1.3 million results I have A LOT OF pages that started with 'bikin website' , or 'website murah' ... there are a lot of them, and i have had a lot of backlinks on those pages too (have been manually building a lot of links, starting from creating a tutorial article and blog submission and many other way) .. the site has been perfectly optimized for that keyword For example we have http://ikt.co.id/blog-category/bikin-website-murah-promo-terbaru.html (for newest promotion) http://ikt.co.id/blog/bikin-website-seo-murah-discount-40-sampai-31-juli-2011.html (for discount 40% promo that lasted untill 31 juli 2011) AND YET, if you search on google.co.id for keyword "2000 likes facebook" , our lone page that i created when our facebook likes reached that amount, RANKED #1!! , and please let me tell you this term return 400 million results++ (on google.com this keyword ranked #19, on 500 million results++). And let me tell you it take that SINGLE page (which has absolutely 0 backlinks) 2 days to ranked #1 .... and her brother if you searched "1000 likes facebook" also show similar result (though not better then the sister) How ?!? and Why ?!? , i dont understand this at all.... my domain does not contain any keyword, they uses the same engine and yet that lone pages which have absolutely no backlink ranked so well on a very competitive keyword, while my Target Keyword ranked poorly.... And what is even more bizzare? "Bikin website murah" might not rank good, but "bikin website" ranked better x_x ... arghh i dont get it... why my site ranked poorly on easy keywords and ranked high on difficult keywords :(( .... Why I am not smiling because those easy keyword is actually my primary keywords 😞
Competitive Research | | IKT0 -
Why do some websites that have hardly any backlinks, poorly optimised get placed above sites that are doing all they can with SEO?
For example take these two websites. www.rfasecurity.co.uk is a site that Iam working on and have had some success with yet snifferdogs.org.uk seems to be poorly optimised with little backlinks and still gets place higher. is it due to the key word in the domian name? The key search word is sniffer dogs New at this so any help would be appreciated regards Dave
Competitive Research | | ThePod0