Why is my website so unbearably slow?
Lately, we’ve been going nuts with a problem some of our visitors are having. They keep complaining to us that our site is unbearably slow. Here’s the problem. When we check it out, it’s just fine. It’s not the fastest site on the planet, but certainly not the slowest either. So what’s causing the problem? One clue we have is that the only customers who are complaining use IE6. Unfortunately, that’s all we know.
So how do we figure out the problem? Who do you call when your website is having technical problems? When you dial website 911, who picks up the phone? For us, the question is a mystery. We’ve tried posting requests for help at E-lance and Guru.com. Unfortunately, the responses are confusing and do not inspire us.
We’ve asked friends and colleagues to help as well. Can analytics help us? We’ve looked at our stats and found that, yes, IE6 users are less engaged in our website. But it doesn’t tell us the problem.
One interesting tool we’ve found is Yslow. This program analyzes your website and tells you where you need to reduce your JavaScript, or DNS calls and offers several suggestions. Yslow works with Firefox only. If our problem was with Firefox, we’d have it figured out in no time.
So what do you do when you have these problems? I’m all ears.
Klaus Johannes Rusch added the following ...
There are ways to debug Internet Explorer traffic too:
1. Install Internet Explorer 6 using the Multiple IE tool (http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE)
2. Install the Fiddler tool to watch traffic (http://www.fiddlertool.com/)
That said, your pages seem to load fine in IE6 also, the large Flash files take their time but no more than in other browsers.
The page also tries to load http://paul.webanalyticsdemystified.com/include/analytics/common_analytics_functions.js, which does not exist.
Are all IE6 users less engaged, or just some, hinting at a possible problem with a specific version or an add-on?
Diane Hoag added the following ...
Page Detailer works with either IE or Firefox. It lists the page elements being loaded, along with the size and time required for each. The time is broken down into connect, server response, delivery etc. times. It’s easy to use and intuitive.
Page Detailer is available by free download from IBM alphaWorks at http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/pagedetailer.
Another thought: IE6 is probably the most commonly used browser right now, so response time complaints coming from IE6 users may simply reflect that browser’s popularity.
Allan Wind added the following ...
AVG has been cloaking as IE6 so make sure you consider the network path between the user and your servers in case traffic is being throttled.
Here is a free service but probably not that interesting:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze
Another Firefox plugin you may want to checkout is Firebug. It has a Net tab showing time per URL. It is my tool weapon of choice for debugging this type of stuff.
Obviously you want to start with a cold cache if that matches the end-user scenario.
/Allan
S.Hamel added the following ...
You could go through the trouble of installing vmware or virtual PC with a bunch of configurations to test different versions of your browser… pretty inefficient and so Web 1.0 way!
The Web 2.0 way would be to use BrowsrCamp (http://www.browsrcamp.com/) or Cross Browser Testing (http://www.crossbrowsertesting.com) and I’m sure there are others too.