Category: Page Load Speed

Dotcom-Monitor News

Using Dotcom-Monitor’s Services, NCM Online Finds Midsized Web Hosts are the Best

Leveraging Dotcom-Monitor services, NCM Online developed fact-based observations about the performance of 20 leading web hosts in June, and continues to test additional hosts throughout the year (the most recent update to the list was 8/2/2014). These tests include purchasing a shared hosting plan from each provider and gathering page-load speed averages and uptime percentages from at least 10 concurrent days using identical websites on each provider. This process provides 2 of the ten criteria NCM Online uses to rank different shared hosting service providers.

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New Features to Test How DNS Caching Affects Your Website

The new DNS caching features at Dotcom-Monitor allow you to perform some interesting tests that show how DNS caching can affect your page load speed.

We realize that many organizations monitor their online services with a number different goals in mind, and so we listened to the feedback we received that some users want to include the DNS response time in their monitoring and some users want to be able to remove DNS response from their monitors.

How you wish to handle DNS response time in regard to your monitoring needs is up to you, but we want to take this opportunity to show the differences in how DNS response time affects website load using our new tools.

We ran a test monitoring YouTube from a single location in the midwest United States with three different DNS cache settings. A basic HTTP full page load on the YouTube front page resulted in some interesting, although not that surprising results.

Keep in mind the results will vary depending upon a number of variables such as which locations you are monitoring from, the time of day, the load on the DNS servers, and on the website servers.

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Optimizing the Front End with Time to Interact (TTI)

Despite claims that slow websites are a major turnoff for site visitors the problem is growing. However, there is a bright spot, as some websites have caught on to an emerging key metric for the usability of a website and the user experience it delivers: Time to Interact (TTI).

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How To Speed Up WordPress
Page Load Speed

How to Speed Up a Slow WordPress Website – Four Tips

WordPress is a great platform for easily creating websites, but it suffers from a flaw that can be fatal in today’s SEO world: It’s slow. Everyone knows it’s slow. The problem is, users are impatient, and you’ll likely lose customers when your WordPress site loads in anything more than the acceptable response time. And it gets worse: Google factors in website load time when determining search engine rankings so if your site is slow users never make it to your site at all.

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Waterfall Chart: Data Visualization for Web Performance Analysis

A waterfall chart, a form of data visualization that maps the cumulative effect of sequentially introduced values, can help. When tracking Web performance, a waterfall chart can help determine how long it takes for each action between the Web server and the user when a user accesses a website. This data can help website administrators understand how individual elements of a their sites are impacting performance.

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