How fast is my front page?

[loopyal]

Yesterday, I changed all of my front page structure from tables to divs.

I think this has improved page load time, but I am in Australia, so it is hard to tell.

Using Firefox with Firebug tells me the load time here is between 4 to 6 seconds.

One of my editors is in Houston, and she says 2 seconds.

I'm hoping you can help me, it will take less than a minute.

Can you load the front page and tell me how long it takes - and where you are - Country/State

Also, if you click to a story, how long does that take?

http://newsblaze.com

I am working on the story page template too, but it will take longer to get right, because it also is the same for 3 other areas, so I have to be more careful. It would also be nice to get a before and after snapshot from various places.

The reason I care about shaving off a second or two is that I've been told google may now care about loading speed, and they are rejecting my new adsense account because of poor user experience on my site, and I have no idea what they mean by that, so I'm clutching at straws.

[Andropenis_Australia]

Hello Alan,

I'm from QLD and on a very poor wireless connection, it took about 6 secs for the page to physically load and about another two for the rest of the non physical loading/communication with the server/s.

A very decent load time IMO, and it would really depend on the speed of the connection that the end user has, but there are websites and tools that measure your speed against most of the other sites on the net.

All the best, I hope I was of some assistance

[nmiller]

Check out Pingdom, I find it useful for site speed tests, and it also lets you to run the tests out of a couple different locations.

Pingdom is showing 2.56 seconds out of Dallas Texas, and I'm seeing 2 seconds on the West Coast for your site.

[loopyal]

Thank you Andropenis, I appreciate it.

We have readers all over the world, so the content delivery network helps in many places. The main server is in Houston and all calls go through that.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Try http://www.webpagetest.org/ , https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights , http://tools.pingdom.com/ , http://www.gomez.com/ , http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/09/how-to-speed-up-your-site-with-yslow-and-page-speed/ & if you need a fast host use a managed Wordpress host (WP Engine, Zippy Kid, WebSynthesis or Page.ly) if your not on Wordpress I like FireHost, Liquid Web, Pair Networks, & Peer1) Remember DNS matters (DynECT DNS, UltraDNS, Verisign DNS, AWS Route 53 & DNS Made Easy) there great Uses a CDN. If you want speed Get a good CDN for less ( MaxCDN $39 per 1TB & 24 POPs, CDN77 $40 per 1TB 50+ POPs, AWS CloudFront pay per uses about the same $50 1 TB & CloudFlare base Free 22 POPs going from $0 , $20 to $200 a month NOT A TRUE CDN if you ask me ) Fast CDN's can cost $100 and way up a month This is dependent on traffic and other things concerning your particular website I hope I was of help. Sincerely, Tom

[loopyal]

Thank you Tom.

I'll check all of those.

I can't use wordpress.

I have almost a million pages. (deleted 1.5 million already)

When I built NewsBlaze, there was no good CMS, and my URL structure is my own. It would be a nightmare to change now, and I'd have to be convinced it was worth it.

I have a 16 processor quadcore dedicated machine with 8Gb Ram at Softlayer, and a softlayer CDN

Most of my images are tuned up. What slows the pages, I think, is the social media, including google+  For example, google loads 11 javascripts, Sharethis has 5 different DNS lookups,

I tried UltraDNS for 3 months but a) I didn't detect any improvement and b) it was too expensive. My Softlayer CDN costs almost nothing over the cost of the dedicated server

[BlueprintMarketing]

Well Frist off I think Wordpress is the way to go ( I need time to get the info to show you why.) Zerigo GEO DNS ($20) & DNS Made Easy GEO DNS ($50) AWS Route 53 GEO DNS ($?) Zerigo geo is fast very very fast to see run http://wpengine.com DynECT geo ($209) UltraDNS geo ( $200) Your DNS https://blueprintmrk.sharefile.com/?cmd=d&id=004ca177abe44293 Hosting http://www.stormondemand.com/ http://www.firehost.com/compare https://www.zunicore.com/features/ http://www.peer1.com/cloud-hosting/hpc-cloud/comparison The real speed host http://mediatemple.net/helix/ CDN http://www.turbobytes.com/ I will add more feel free to email me if you need to know why Wordpress. I will send a PM All the best, Tom