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
-
Check my website loading time
Kindly check my website loading time for the home page and deep pages. Do I need to make it fast or it is Okey? Website - brandstenmedia.com.au
Technical SEO | | Green.landon0 -
Spike in server errors
Hi, we've recently changed shopping cart platforms. In doing so a lot of our URL's changed, but I 301'ed all of the significant landing pages (as determined by G Analytics) prior to the switch. However, WMT is warning me about this spike in server errors now with all the pages that no longer exist. However they are only crawling them because they used to exist/are linked from pages that used to exist. and no longer actually exist. Is this something I should worry about? Or let it run its course?
Technical SEO | | absoauto0 -
Moving image directory location on redesign.
I'm getting ready to do a redesign for a client and one thing that annoys me about the directory structure of the website is that he has files buried deep in the directories. For example, the images are buried like four folders deep in some cases and I would like to move all of those images into an images folder directly below the root. All of those images, however, have already been indexed by google and show up in google images. If I start moving those images around, could it hurt his rankings?
Technical SEO | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Will a timed 301 redirect work for Googlebot?
Our client is changing brand names and domain names. We know we need to 301 redirect the old domain, but for marketing reasons we want people to see a short message saying that the brand has changed and that they will be redirected. Example: | | Our concern is how, or if, Googlebot will intepret the redirect. Will this accomplish our SEO objective of moving the value of the page to the new domain, or do we need to do just a plain old fashioned 301 redirect and not even let the page load? Thanks for your help.
Technical SEO | | GOODSIR0 -
Page authority has disappeared since redirect
As the title states, my page authority (PA) has completely disappeared for certain pages on my site.
Technical SEO | | Hughescov
I have recently had a redesign and optimised the page names, redirecting the page it has replaced.
This has been nearly 2 months now and the new pages are showing PA of 1 still.
The 301 redirects definitely work so what am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance!0 -
I'm redesigning a website which will have a new URL format. What's the best way to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones? Is there an automated, fast way to do this?
For example, the new URL will be: https://oregonoptimalhealth.com/about_us.html while the old one's were like this: http://www.oregonoptimalhealth.com/home/ooh/smartlist_1/services.html I have redirect almost 100 old pages to the correct new page. What's the best and easiest way to do this?
Technical SEO | | PolarisMarketing0 -
Mysterious drop of website ranking in google
Usually, I don't want to bother anybody by posting silly questions on forums. But this time I really might need advice. My wife and I took over the website maintenance and e-marketing of a local air conditioning company end of March this year. Before that the applied SEO strategies were not very user friendly and a little too search engine focused (spammy keyword stuffed articles, confusing website structure, a lot of directory links). Yesterday night (May 15th) the website more or less stopped ranking. For search terms like "ac repair englewood fl" or "trane north port" and many more the website was on page 1. Here are some more details: I replaced the old website with a newer version end of April. Since some of old the url structure did not apply any longer, I did a setup of around 30 301-redirects in .htaccess. The new site seemed to rank more or less as expected. The homepage has a PakeRank of 1 (seomoz Page Authority is 31). I am working on that but good natural links just take some time. site:kobiecomplete.com still brings up all the pages Google Webmaster Tools notified me on May 12th that there was a possible outage: _"_While crawling your site, we have noticed an increase in the number of transient soft 404 errors around 2012-05-08 16:00 UTC (London, Dublin, Edinburgh). Your site may have experienced outages. These issues may have been resolved. Here are some sample pages that resulted in soft 404 errors:" The listed pages under "some sample pages" are only pages from the old website which do not exist any longer and the 301 redirect was not setup. But this should have been already any issue before, if at all.
Technical SEO | | grojoh
I added the missing 301 redirects and marked them as fixed in Google Webmaster Tools. I had a copy of the website on a testing webspace (root directory of brightsidewg.com). Even though I had robots.txt set to disallow everything and WordPress search engine privacy set to do not index / follow, the website appeared on the Google search results yesterday night instead of the original website (kobiecomplete.com). Even though brightsidewg was a few ranks worse than kobiecomplete.com was, it was still ranking.
To remove the duplicate content, I deleted everything on brightsidewg.com and requested the removal of the website in the Webmaster Tools. Now brightsidewg.com is not any longer indexed (good) but it didn't help the ranking of kobiecomplete.com. Especially the homepage and the service area pages were ranking pretty decent on Google before yesterday night. Now I can not find them at all. Only other less important pages rank on page 8+ No malware on website I did not do any big changes on the website yesterday (only really minor ones). I did not acquire any weird/paid links even though there is a new link from a PageRank 0 website which I did not setup: http://www.indo-karya.com/detail/news/2012/kombise But that alone I think would not be enough for a penalty. It almost looks like that Google applied a partial -950 filter!? I could submit the website for reconsideration to Google and tell them about the duplicate content issue with my testing webspace brightsidewg.com. What do you think about it and what shall I do? Thank you so much for any help!0 -
Impact on domain when using a subdomain for majority opf site content
Hello, We're looking to use a subdomain for a bookings engine that will also host the majority of our site content as it wil house the details of the courses that we'll be selling online. All content is currently available on www.existingdomain.co.uk A few pages will remain here but the majority will ultimately be hosted on a different IP address under a subdomain: courses.existingdomain.co.uk I am a little concerened about search engine reaction to this content separation. Would this approach dilute the rankings of www.existingdomain.co.uk? Is there anything else we need to be mindful of? We have alternative options if this is a real SEO faux pas. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Urbanfox0