Mysterious ave pageload time spikes since major redesign
-
Hello Moz Community,
About six months ago, we completely redesigned our heavily trafficked website. We updated the navigation, made the site responsive, and refreshed all the site's content. We were hoping to get a rankings boost from all the hard work we put in, but sadly our traffic began to steadily decline. We started to notice that although overall page load speeds were comparable before and after the redesign if you compared them on an hourly basis, we saw random hourly spikes in ave page load speed post redesign.
Here is a pic of our analytics comparing our hourly ave. page load speeds pre vs. post redesign: https://screencast.com/t/8WQeyhquHN (after is in blue, before in orange)
We have spent around 3 months trying to figure out the underlying cause of the new load time spikes. My question is has anyone seen anything like this before? Does anyone have any suggestions what might be causing the spikes? As far as we can tell, the spikes are indeed random and are not correlated to any particular time of day, our traffic, or other activity we are doing. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Eric
-
Quick thing to check - have a look at your server logs. Those kinds of random load time increases look typical of the load spikes that are typical of bot overloads - where spambots may be hitting your pages in bursts, causing the server to overload and slow (or even reset, as Vijay mentions).
Those bot hits aren't recorded in GA - you'll have to look at the actual server access logs to find them.
Hope that helps?
Paul
-
Hi Eric,
Thanks for your response, please do update about the final solution for the benefit of all.
Let me know if you have further queries.
Regards,
Vijay
-
We have not detected anything wrong with our site from a user perspective-- that is what is so frustrating. Thanks for your time and response!
-
Thank you Vijay, I am having our developer take a look at all of our scripts.
-
Your page seems to load fine, have you personally seen the website load horribly at the times the chart and analytics indicates that it is? I don't think there is anything wrong with your site, so if the chart is actually accurate then it can only be the web host is dropping the ball
-
Hi Eric,
We had faced a similar problem with one of our clients, in the end, it was some scripts (both front-end and back-end) which were not ending/terminating properly and overloading the server. The script overload meant the server responses became slow till the resources were exhausted and reset by server mechanism. To summarize, it might be attributed to some bad scripting code.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
Vijay
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
-
Can ht access file affect page load times
We have a large and old site. As we've transition from one CMS to another, there's been a need for create 301 redirects using our ht access file. I'm not a technical SEO person, but concerned that the size of our ht access file might be contributing source for long page download times. Can large ht access files cause slow page load times? Or is the coding of the 301 redirect a cause for slow page downloads? Thanks
Technical SEO | | ahw1 -
Moving old Yahoo Store (since 2000) to Magento Enterprise. What are the pitfalls to be aware of?
What are the most dangerous things we should be aware of in moving an old domain from 2000 from Yahoo Store to Magento Enterprise, SEO wise? We know about setting up the 301s. Anything else we should be on top of? Site is www.EarphoneSolutions.com
Technical SEO | | Maduca0 -
Is there ever a time when 301 redirects aren't possible?
I have been told that 301 redirects are always possible. I've been told that it's a very time consuming process so developers at times will say that it's not possible. Is there ever a time when it is not impossible? Perhaps using a specific server? I know it's do-able in Apache which is the server that is in question. Would it be impossible if someone were using a templated type set of websites & if they made changes on one website it would make changes across all websites? *Edit "due to a server configuration 301 redirects aren't possible" Thanks so much for any help or answers you can provide.
Technical SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Open site explorer. Possibility to select a time period?
Is it possible to add a time period to the open site explorer? E.g. The external links of other websites grew very fast since February. It would be nice to have a feature with which it is possible to select the time period (from February to today). Without this function it is solely possible to see ALL links of all months and years. I would like to see only the external links since e.g. February. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | TeunTibaco0 -
Trading longer load time for greater link potential
How do you approach balancing load time with making a page linkworthy? For example, if you create a page with a lot of rich media like infographics, images, videos, and audio, this will probably increase page load time but it will be more likely to earn links.
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
Issues with Google Analytics since 3/15 @ 6:00AM ET
Our site, IrishCentral.com has been experiencing issues with GA since 6:00AM ET 3/15. Our "realtime" analytics withing the new GA interface have been fine and no changes have been made to the site code at all. I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing these issues and if there is a resolution. We are fine w/o them as long as we know that the aggregation of the data is delayed and not forgotten. We are reaching 1 million uniques this month and would be a shame to lose this data. Any help is greatly appreciated. Joe
Technical SEO | | Irishcentral1 -
A huge drop in rankings since last 10 days, and not recovered yet.
Hi Mozzers, I have a serious topic to discuss and want help from the experts here. Our website has 6 PR and we have been consistency staying at the top for very competitive terms in the niche. Since last Friday (24th February, 2012) we have been facing massive fluctuation in the rankings for most of the keywords we are focusing on. After this fall, we checked the following details but didn’t find any serious/critical issue that might be contributing towards these fluctuations:- We analyzed Google webmaster tools, there’s no update/warning from Google regarding any negative activity and other things seem to be normal. We checked our website through site search (site: www.domain.com) and found that we haven’t lost any indexed pages and things appear normally as they used to. So, we are sure that we haven’t been banned or penalized. We also cross verified our link building and other promotional activities and we didn’t find anything suspicious that could lead to such a big fluctuation. The drop is really big, some keywords went to 5th or 6th page from top 3 position; some keywords are not in top 200 or 300 spots which were usually staying put between 5th to 10th position. We have analyzed a lot but haven’t come to know the reason why we are facing this fluctuation. Our website is 4 years old and this kind of fluctuation has happened for the first time. Has anyone faced this kind of issue before? I’m looking forward to your support in identifying this trouble. Thanks
Technical SEO | | ValSmith0 -
On a dedicated server with multiple IP addresses, how can one address group be slow/time out and all other IP addresses OK?
We utilize a dedicated server to host roughly 60 sites on. The server is with a company that utilizes a lady who drives race cars.... About 4 months ago we realized we had a group of sites down thanks to monitoring alerts and checked it out. All were on the same IP address and the sites on the other IP address were still up and functioning well. When we contacted the support at first we were stonewalled, but eventually they said there was a problem and it was resolved within about 2 hours. Up until recently we had no problems. As a part of our ongoing SEO we check page load speed for our clients. A few days ago a client who has their site hosted by the same company was running very slow (about 8 seconds to load without cache). We ran every check we could and could not find a reason on our end. The client called the host and were told they needed to be on some other type of server (with the host) at a fee increase of roughly $10 per month. Yesterday, we noticed one group of sites on our server was down and, again, it was one IP address with about 8 sites on it. On chat with support, they kept saying it was our ISP. (We speed tested on multiple computers and were 22MB down and 9MB up +/-2MB). We ran a trace on the IP address and it went through without a problem on three occassions over about ten minutes. After about 30 minutes the sites were back up. Here's the twist: we had a couple of people in the building who were on other ISP's try and the sites came up and loaded on their machines. Does anyone have any idea as to what the issue is?
Technical SEO | | RobertFisher0