Very slow loading times - what can i do?

[PEAB]

Hi.

Bit of a newbie here but please stay with me. My site (www.themos.biz) is hosted by bluehost. Whilst i can't complain about the price and features it is very slow to load. I carried out a trace route and it says hops on average respond in 82ms. However at the host end it goes as far as 198ms with considerable packet loss. Not much of this means a lot to me - all i know is it takes a while for my page to show!

Is it because i'm UK based and the site is hosted in the US? Should i consider finding a different and closer host? Or is it something else?

I'm sure you get this sort of junk regularly but any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[Early Out]

If you're a new BH customer, you may simply be experiencing a phenomenon that I've noticed before. A new customer gets put onto the newest server, along with a bunch of other new customers. Since they're all new, they tend to beat the daylights out of the machine, all uploading mountains of stuff, installing software, experimenting with various scripts, making mistakes, etc., etc. Things tend to settle down within a couple of weeks, so my best advice is to have a little patience.

I'm also seeing some overloaded nodes between me (East Coast, U.S.) and the BH servers (Utah) - in particular, there's a Level3 node in Chicago that seems to be misbehaving today. You might be running into some of the same issues, but this is also a temporary condition. You could just as easily have an overloaded node between you and the village next door, so getting a host closer to home might not help a bit.

[PEAB]

Thanks for the reply. Your comments about being a new customer are definitely valid, i know i myself have a tendency to try lots of things etc. However i've had this site on BlueHost since June now and it has been pretty slow from the beginning. I'm loathed to make it fully live (this is an intended new site for one that is already running) until i can sort the problem.

I am a newbie - hence i use wordpress for the basics and just assumed the distance from the host was probably responsible? Worth trying a closer one maybe?

Thanks again.

[Early Out]

I honestly don't think the distance from the host explains what you're seeing. Your main page comes up pretty slowly for me as well, and I've got a 10mpbs connection just two time zones away from the server. I don't know much about Wordpress or the enhancements you've installed, but just looking at the source code, there seems to be an awful lot happening on that page - in particular, there are lots of Javascript routines to be called up and parsed.

[NieroStudios]

Hey, yeah I had a look at your scripts... I am not too sure either. But you could try doing the following,

Get some crapy freehost that will load the website for you with 100's of adds (who cares we are just trying to see if its wordpress) I moved from esmartweb freehost, (a good freehost. I mean you get what you pay for... and since the only free thing in this world is cheese in a mousetrap this is a good FREE server, and obviously you get treated that way there too), upload your site, test it, if its still slow, its your coding. (in this case I would recommend something called pivot (nikolai.freehostia.com) if you would like to have a peek look at it. Its a very fast version of what you are using.

Anyway, I had a look at the website and done a speed check with vertain.com

this is what I got
Speed test results:

URL: http://www.themos.biz/
Measured Speed (using 10 mbps T3 connection): 5.47 sec

Should I be concerned about my server's speed?
If your page is slower than 3-4 sec (in the above test), you should be concerned! The page will load in about 20-60 sec on DSL or dial-up connection, longer than the average user is likely to wait.

Just hope like hell that its the new server really, I wont panic up until the next month maybe. Good luck with your website

Nikolai

[PEAB]

Thanks for your help both of you. I'll try testing the site on a freehost then. I suspect you're right and there is so much going on/being loaded script wise that it's taking an age to load.

Cheers.

[mhJr_]

Thanks for your help both of you. I'll try testing the site on a freehost then. I suspect you're right and there is so much going on/being loaded script wise that it's taking an age to load.

Cheers.

They have definitely pointed you in the right direction.
They are some smart people. =]

[PEAB]

Before testing elsewhere i ditched the template/theme i was using for wordpress and it seems the loading times have dramatically reduced. I guess the template has to go. It's a shame because i like it but it takes near 40 seconds to load!


Many thanks for all your suggestions again guys!

[Early Out]

Before testing elsewhere i ditched the template/theme i was using for wordpress and it seems the loading times have dramatically reduced.

Yup, huge difference.

[NieroStudios]

hey, I am not sure weather you know (but i'l tell you anyway) the template loading times are big because people save ther PSD (or whatever else you are using) files by clicking File-Save As-JPG, this leads to long loading times. You could try resaving the template again with File-Save For Web and Devices. Then right clicking on the loading time box that is on the bottom left hand corner selecting ADSL (or Dialup 56k, whatever your target audience is) and then pressing CTRL-A or Apple-A (depending on the system you are using) then look at the bottom left hand corner again and see what kind of loading time it presents. (this is all done using Photoshop, if you dont have it, you can download a trial from the adobe website, or by just going to www.photoshop.com)

Good luck

Nikolai