UKC

How to speed up your web page load time

Why speeding up your web pages is more important than you think

Even with today’s high performance web servers and mega bandwidth broadband to the home that web site page load speed is a massively important issue – yet many webmasters spend little time on the issue.

Would you be surprised to hear that 40% of users abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load?

We are way past the days of modems and 128k ADSL so you would think all websites would load in an instant. Well, that is not the case. To compensate for the increase in bandwidth many webmasters have bloated their web sites with unneccessarily large images, slow plugin-ins and javascripts that simply are not used. Basically there does not seem to be a need to optimise page load time any more – or is there?

Ten years ago people expected pages to load within 30 seconds. Any slower than that and you would start losing users. Time is short and people demand more these days. Your target today has got to be 2 seconds or less.

Here’s five big reasons you need to increase your page load speed

  • A one second delay can reduce conversions by 7%
  • Faster web site is great for user experience
  • Conversion rates and ROI will increase
  • Site speed is incorporated in search rankings
  • Faster pages encourages users to view more pages
For statistics lovers, here is some data from Kissmetrics
  • 47% of consumers expect a website to load in 2 seconds or less
  • 40% abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
  • 79% of shoppers are less likely to make repeat purchases from slow sites
  • 52% state quick page loads are more important then site loyalty
  • A 1 seconds delay decreases customer satisfaction by 16%
  • 44% of shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience

Even looking beyond the user experience you will find that page load time is also a factor for search engine rankings, conversion and perception of your brand. So for many reasons, all important reasons, you need to get your page load time in check.

How to accurately check your page load times

There are a number of tools to help you squeeze the most of your web pages. If you have never optimised your pages before then there are lots of small things you can do increase the speed – you could get 300% with little effort.

The Google Developers are always quick to release super useful tools and PageSpeed is no exception, this should be your first port of call, a simply browser plugin and you’ll get a full report on what is slowing your page speed down and tips on fixing the issues.

My favourite online page speed tester is provided by Pingdom.com, you can compare your site over time and also against other sites. You get a performance grade and a page load comparison against all other tested websites.

Our result: We get a performance grade of 99/100 and our site is faster than 98% of all tested website.

Go to Pingdom now and start to increase your page load speeds as part of your regular webmaster tasks.

How do I extend the ‘validity period of domain’ in Plesk?

Re: validity period of domain, validity period is prolonged, extend the validity period

If you get this message then do not worry about the expiry of your domain name or hosting account. This message relates to the period you applied when you added the domain name to your Plesk panel.

The messages usually contain:

  • validity period of domain
  • validity period is prolonged
  • extend the validity period

This problem occurs if you missed out Step 12 in “How to add a domain to multi-domain hosting“.

To resolve, simply log in to your Plesk control panel, select the appropriate domain name, go to Resource Usage and ensure that the “Expiration date” is set to “Never Expires“.

Plesk: AtMail search does not work

AtMailRe: Search doesn’t work in AtMail, AtMail search returns no results

AtMail is a great webmail application that has a high level of functionality, an attractive looking interface and many useful integrated features.

One of these feature includes a bug that causes the “Search” function to return no results for any search!

To fix it, you need SSH Root access to your dedicated server console. If you want to get down and dirty, edit the following two lines:

Change Line 364: $before = "$BeforeDay-$BeforeMonth-$BeforeYear";
Change Line 369: $after = "$AfterDay-$AfterMonth-$AfterYear";

Alternatively, run the following two SED commands and the lines containing the bugs will be automatically fixed.

# sed 's/20$BeforeYear/$BeforeYear/g' /var/www/atmail/search.php > /var/www/atmail/search.php.new
# sed 's/20$AfterYear/$AfterYear/g' /var/www/atmail/search.php.new > /var/www/atmail/search.php
# rm -f /var/www/atmail/search.php.new

Happy searching!

How to: Installing CA [root] Certificates

Install CA CertificatesRe: Installation of CA, Install SSL CA Certificates

If you are using a shared or managed hosting service (such as Plesk) then the installation of SSL certificates is straightforward and can be done through the control panel interface. However, when you need to install on a server level with no panel things are a little more involved.

To install certificate authority (CA) certs in your Centos server:

  • Copy the certificates to /etc/pki/tls/certs
  • Edit /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf
  • Add “SSLCACertificateFile /etc/pki/tls/certs/YourCAFile.crt”
  • Test with “service httpd configtest”

If all ok, “service httpd restart”

Plesk Migration Manager (PMM) Stalls at 50% Completion

Plesk Migration ManagerRe: Insufficient storage for Plesk  9.5.4 Migration Manager (even though there is)

If you are having problems using the Plesk Migration Manager, one of the first problems you need to solve is the insufficient space problem. There are many problems with the PMM but that’s another story, you’re probably here because you really need to get it working.

You may get a failed migration due to this issue, or a constant hang at 50% completion without any error.

Even though you get the opportunity to set a data dump location (default within /var) and you have likely carefully ensured that there is another psace storage on that device, what you don’t know is an intermediate storage space is also required in /usr/local/psa/PMM.

Luckily this problem is easily dealt with by creating a symbolic link for the PMM directory.

The examples below move the PMM directory to a secondary drive namely /backup.

1. Let’s create the new PMM directory on a drive with plenty of free space.

# mkdir /backup/PMM

2. Now we will copy the PMM directory and its contents to the new PMM directory whilst preserving the ownership and permissions.

# cp -Rp /usr/local/psa/PMM/* .

3. Set the current PMM directory aside

# mv /usr/local/psa/PMM /usr/local/psa/PMM.old

4. Now we create the symbolic link

# ln -s /backup/PMM /usr/local/psa/PMM

The PMM directory is now symbolically mapped to a drive with suffienct space for your migration to complete. You may need to abort any previous migrations and restart as often they do not restart once stopped due to an insufficient storage space problem.

See this entry on Parallels KB: http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=100327