My friend who inspired me to start this site said that this HA domain name is on a Godaddy server with 2,000 other domain names, which greatly slows down its performance and page loading times. He said that after he increased his page loading times, Google ranked his site a lot higher, and as a result, his traffic doubled and now he is making a lot more money than before.
He also said that my site is not enabled with gzip compression, which if enabled, would great increase page load times too. I'm not sure how to enable that but I'll email Godaddy about it.
So how would I get my domain name moved to a server with less domain names on it, or to a dedicated server where it would be the only domain name on it? I'm not sure Godaddy would let me do that. What can I do? What are the options?
Also, this site's speed and performance seems to be pretty bad, based on this report on Page Speed Insights for HA:
http://developers.google.com/speed/page ... abroad.com
http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dX596M/ ... abroad.com
Any suggestions?
Is it really true that increasing page load times will increase SEO and thus increase traffic as well? Even if that's true, how can that double the traffic on your site? That seems hard to believe.
Here is what my friend wrote me:
Winston, your problem is that you're a cheapskate! I'll bet my words recently about the difference between a "tinker toy" web site (with maybe 10 visitors a day) and a "big time" site (like yours and mine) were just ignored. You can not expect to host a site well for $5 a month, especially not a popular site. Get it?
You think you are "saving" $50 a month by staying with El Cheapo hosting solution. Sure, you are. But your EARNINGS are almost certainly more than $50-a-month less than what they would be if your site was fast and search engines (not just Google remember) like it more. I'd hazard a guess that by using El Cheapo hosting you are losing HUNDREDS a month in income. My income today was $450. A couple of months ago, $150 was a good day on my old web host. That's DAY. That difference ($300/day) translates to $9,000 a month... and $9,000 buys you some pretty freaking good web hosting! (I'm paying $60 a month for my own server...)
Of COURSE GoDaddy can move you to your own server if you want that. NO other sites on your server. At all. But no, they "won't agree" if your maximum budget remains at $5 a month! LOL!!
You don't find the page crawl speed in the Labs tab. You find it uncer Crawl --> Crawl Stats, bottom of the 3 images. So, what does your site's High, Average a Low page download time say there?
You can find the timings for loading whole pages on your site under Google Analytics.
The link you sent me measures the performance while loading the entire page. I suggest you start by enabling compression on your server... Google says it's switched off on your site. Just go into your control panel and there should be an option to turn on gzip compression (if not, then that's just another nail in GoDaddy's coffin...) This means that pages are compressed (down to maybe 20% of their actual size) on the server, then this smaller file is sent to your browser (80% less bandwidth used), and then your browser decompresses it. This would make a very noticeable improvement to the scores (35/100 and 49/100) that Google gives your site at the moment.
What I was talking about is the time for Google (and other search engines) to spider just the *content* (words/text/HTML) of your web site. They don't generally download the included files (js, css) or images. I'm averaging about 80ms per page on my site. If you see regular spikes in your graph, that means your server is suffering from congestion. Your graph should be more or less a flat line.
Of course, it's important to optimize as many aspects as you can, both for spiders and visitors. Go through the 5 red items in the list that Google gives you in the link you sent me, and try to improve as many as you can. Enabling compression is the easy one.
And remember, it's not just the home page... it's EVERY page that should load as quickly as possible. The easiest way to improve overall load times on your site is to do 'global things' such as enabling gzip compression on your server and putting your site on a faster/less populated server.
Hi Winston,
*If* this speeds up anything, it should speed things up for Googlebot also. However, like I wrote, improvements are most likely to be very marginal. When I used Google's "Page Speed" test (to see if my site would benefit from this similar service), my site often loaded MORE SLOWLY than it does now! And this PageSpeed/CDN is quite complicated and restrictive so I wouldn't bother.
The two most important things you can do are:
1) Focus on reducing the number of requests per page, and obviously the amount of data downloaded per page;
2) Getting OFF a server that hosts 2,084 or more other domains!
Come on Winston, you're no dummy. You know that even one site can bring a server to a crawl, particularly if there's a poorly-written or looping piece of code. So what are the chances of your site being slowed down by 2,084 other sites??? Can you say 100.00%?
So, what are your average Webmaster Tools timings for Googlebot to load your pages?
