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
-
Page speed load time - 3 seconds
This Moz blog references a page load time of 2-3 seconds. I've seen the 3 seconds referenced elsewhere, but I'm not sure what that measurement is -- is the target a 3 second speed index, or 3 second CPU idle? Or something else? Curious if anyone knows the answer. https://moz.com/blog/website-page-speed
Technical SEO | | LivDetrick0 -
Pages with a short life time... example Flash Sales Ecommerce Sites?
Hello everyone, I am managing an ecommerce website and I am not sure what policy I need to make for a lot of the product pages.The Product pages, example Givency Bag, go live on a specific date and go down in a few days... like Groupon. Please shed some light in this dark tunnel.
Technical SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz
Thanks and regards,0 -
Site Redesign - Regaining Rankings
We just finished designing a whole new site that will hopefully convert better than our previous site and we are currently coding it. We are hoping to get the site out in the next month or two (or three!). We want to know what to expect in regard to our sales from SEO. If you successfully launched a site redesign and your conversion rate improved, can you answer this question? How long will it take for my rankings to regain their initial ranking and then hopefully rank even higher?
Technical SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Moving site between hosts over short time scale
Hi Does anyone know if moving your website between hosts & server location 3 times in a relatively short time frame (say 2 months) can have a negative impact from an seo perspective ? Cheers
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
Dan0 -
Googlebot take 5 times longer to crawl each page
Hello All From about mid September my GWMT has show that the average time to crawl a page on my site has shot up from an average of 130ms to an average of 700ms and peaks at 4000ms. I have checked my server error logs and found nothing there, I have checked with the hosting comapny and there are no issues with the server or other sites on the same server. Two weeks after this my ranking fell by about 950 places for most of my keywords etc.I am really just trying to eliminate this as a possible cause, of these ranking drops. Or was it the Pand/ EMD algo that has done it. Many Thanks Si
Technical SEO | | spes1230 -
When is the last time Google crawled my site
How do I tell the last time Google crawled my site. I found out it is not the "Cache" which I had thought it was.
Technical SEO | | digitalops0 -
Things to consider with regards to SEO when redesigning a website
I will be redesigning a website in wordpress. currently the website is html/css based My concern is i dont want to lose any of the Search engine rankings. what should i put in place to avoid that situation
Technical SEO | | mancmusicman0 -
If you add a no follow to a time sensitive link, will it get picked up as broken link 404 in WMT report?
We have a client who publishes deals that are time sensitive. Links to the deals expire and so Google's crawlers are picking them up and finding a 404 If I no follow them, will the 404's still get picked up and reported in WMT? The same question applies to SEOMoz Pro.
Technical SEO | | Red_Mud_Rookie0