Mysterious ave pageload time spikes since major redesign

[Eric_R]

Hello Moz Community,

About six months ago, we completely redesigned our heavily trafficked website.  We updated the navigation, made the site responsive, and refreshed all the site's content.  We were hoping to get a rankings boost from all the hard work we put in, but sadly our traffic began to steadily decline.  We started to notice that although overall page load speeds were comparable before and after the redesign if you compared them on an hourly basis, we saw random hourly spikes in ave page load speed post redesign.

Here is a pic of our analytics comparing our hourly ave. page load speeds pre vs. post redesign: https://screencast.com/t/8WQeyhquHN (after is in blue, before in orange)

We have spent around 3 months trying to figure out the underlying cause of the new load time spikes.  My question is has anyone seen anything like this before?  Does anyone have any suggestions what might be causing the spikes?  As far as we can tell, the spikes are indeed random and are not correlated to any particular time of day, our traffic, or other activity we are doing.  Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Eric

8WQeyhquHN

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi Eric,

We had faced a similar problem with one of our clients, in the end, it was some scripts (both front-end and back-end) which were not ending/terminating properly and overloading the server. The script overload meant the server responses became slow till the resources were exhausted and reset by server mechanism.  To summarize, it might be attributed to some bad scripting code.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Vijay

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

Your page seems to load fine, have you personally seen the website load horribly at the times the chart and analytics indicates that it is? I don't think there is anything wrong with your site, so if the chart is actually accurate then it can only be the web host is dropping the ball

[Eric_R]

Thank you Vijay, I am having our developer take a look at all of our scripts.

[Eric_R]

We have not detected anything wrong with our site from a user perspective-- that is what is so frustrating.  Thanks for your time and response!

[Vijay-Gaur]

Hi Eric,

Thanks for your response, please do update about the final solution for the benefit of all.

Let me know if you have further queries.

Regards,

Vijay

[ThompsonPaul]

Quick thing to check - have a look at your server logs. Those kinds of random load time increases look typical of the load spikes that are typical of bot overloads - where spambots may be hitting your pages in bursts, causing the server to overload and slow (or even reset, as Vijay mentions).

Those bot hits aren't recorded in GA - you'll have to look at the actual server access logs to find them.

Hope that helps?

Paul