For those of you who are hosting your site in Godaddy and experiencing some longer response time than usual, well you are not the only one. I have experience a longer response time for sites who are using database such as wordpress blogs.
At the beginning I thought it was only my own account, but after checking all of my clients site who uses GoDaddy, It experiences the same problem started at September 17. (See Graph Below).
Data from urSelections.com
I had problem with this site response time during june and July since I had a high increase in traffic but I have made the necessary changes to improve it in August but as you can see the increase since the 17th and 18t of Sept. where response time have went from less than 1 sec to 6-10 sec mainly depending on the size of database queries. This time it wasn’t my code fault.
Of course I emailed GoDaddy about the issue and they reply very fast that the issue is known and should be fixed in 24 hours. The issue had improved but it is not as good as before. Now I am still seeing 1-2 sec response time when before it was an avarage of 0.7 sec.
What is response time and why should we bother about it?
Response time: Is the time it takes your website server to response to an inquiry, regardless of the site size, flash or images.
Why Should we bother about it?
Users:
It will take users who goes to your site more time to see the website content.
The browser will show “Waiting for www.xxx.com” and sometimes it will even show “website is taking to much time to response” message which is similar to the message when a website doesn’t exisit.
Google and SEO:
Google and other search engine crawl your site almost every day, the engine robots get the response time into account and report it back to the engine. One of the factor of which Google decide whether to put you in first page is depended also on the website response time.
Another important issue with search engines is for larger sites, the website owner would like Google to index all of his pages. Let say a website have 100,000 pages and Google only show 10,000 index pages for this site. One of the big reason for that may be response time, if it takes Google robots too long to download the website pages they will ignore it.
What should be a good response time and how do I check it?
Response time in general should be less than 1 sec (1,000 milisec), but for better results in Google it should have about 0.4 sec.
You can either use outside tools to check your reponse time such as:
http://www.websitepulse.com/help/tools.php
or look in your Google Webmaster Tools account on the Crawl stats (Same as the Graph above).
Google Webmaster will give you an average of all of your pages and it is your job to find out if it is one page that is increasing the response time average or it is an overall problem.
Response time problems and how do I fix them:
Usually reponse time problem occur when your website is starting to receive more traffic and many times response time increases due to hosting failers, but if you have the same problem for a longer period it might be a code or a database query problem.
Problems & Solutions:
- Hosting – Increase your hosting plan or remove it from a shared server, some servers response time is better than others, Godaddy for example is known for a slow response time, INetU is an exapmple for a server that have faster response time.
- Page (code) – Response time is not due to a large image or flash movie, it is due to a large html file size or a server code that runs before the page loads. Find out which page takes the longest time to show its HTML and try to figure out why. Many website owners now days uses Ajax to do some of the calculation after the page loads, but this information is hidden from Google Robots.
- Database Queries – Code problems and html files size are usually not the issue since code run very fast and usually website code is not that complex, database queries are a more of a common problem and improving them is not an easy task. As mention above when the site is new usually it runs smoothly since the database is small and queries runs very fast, but as the website grows so does the database and the number of queries that runs at the same time. This usually cause queries to load slow and make the overall response time to increase. There are automatic tools that helps you search for the query that takes longer to load and also there are DBA(Data Base Admin) specialist who can help you fix the problem. As mention above it is not an easy task…
Database issue and response time are usually a more complex issues, and improving a database/server response time requires higher knowledge of working with servers and databases, that is why I appreciate DBAs for their skills.
In the mean while I sure hope that GoDaddy will improve their database response time and that soon it will go back to normal.