Website Loading Time Analysis - Pingdom

Have you ever tried visiting websites that takes a century to load on your screen? That you can still have time to go to a grocery and still the website is loading when you came back home? I experienced that today, and that happened to my website maxginez3.com. It was a very tremendous experience, in fact I even  went upstairs and make myself a cup of coffee and when I came back on my PC the page was still loading. My gosh what is happening?
At first, I suspected an ISP problem, but when I checked other websites, BOOM so fast even though I only have a 1MBPS connection speed. Next suspect was perhaps Google, since Google owns Blogspot.com where my Blog was hosted under http://www.maxginez3.blogspot.com/, but when I tried searching a word from google searchbar, the speed was still amazing. So I end up worrying a lot because I have no idea how it happened suddenly without any warning. I was so frustrated thinking of all the SEO efforts that I have done so far.
It may have taken around 2 hours of my time sorting out the problem but I'm just fortunate enough to solved it. So here are the steps that I made with the screenshots so you guys can follow along. But before that, I would like you to read the following list because I thought it is best to understand some technical background behind this slow loading problem.

Reasons of Slow Loading Websites

Unlike the dial-up connection way back years ago, there are no reason that websites should load slowly because today’s high-speed connections and advances in web development techniques assures the reliability of our internet.

Web Hosting Issues

Choosing the right web host contributes a lot on website loading speed. There may be cases that a web server is down due to lack of maintenance. And in some cases shared hosting packages may also cause the problem because the uploading speed (server side) is distributed between sharing websites.

Server-Intensive Dynamic Scripts

Some websites generate their pages from data stored in databases. These are called Dynamic websites which loads slower compared to purely HTML websites. Although the delay is not often noticed on small, low-traffic websites, but for large websites and increase in popularity; the delay is even more noticeable, but this problem is solved by caching. Caching enables your browser to save chunks of dynamic documents allowing files to be accessed when needed.

Unoptimized Images

An image intensive website loads slowly, especially on full size uncropped images. And this is one of the usual problem that most bloggers do (including me).

Flash Enabled page

Although adding Flash on your website is great because it adds interactivity and animation but this will also contribute to a slow loading website. That is why some web developers discourage the use of Flash and instead they focus on optimizing it.

Too much HTML Codes

Well of course, the larger the file size of your webpage, the longer it will takes to load. But there are techniques to shorten file sizes and these is by writing efficient code:

• Avoid inline styles if possible
• Remove unnecessary white spaces
• Using CSS shortcuts
• External CSS & JavaScript
• Refrain from Table based Layout and use CSS/DIV instead

Embedding External Media

Adding external videos, slideshows, etc… causes your website to load slowly. Infact if you have embedded media, your website will only be as fast as the external website that hosts that media. So if some external website is having a slow day, so will yours because your website will have to download that file in order to display on the browser. So if possible, try to host all your content on your own web server. We therefore conclude, using external media is definitely a bad idea. But if you really need to source out that media, better use an Anchor Tag target as blank to open a new window and this simple technique will save the day.

So after reviewing these List of Reasons that causes a website to load slowly, I immediately think of the keyword to use in searching for an answer. By using google, I searched for "Analyze Blogger Loading Time" and the result pointed me Pingdom.com Website Speed Test.

Basically, Pingdom.com is a company Based in Sweden with online serices that tracks the uptime, downtime, and performance of websites. They have their monitoring servers located globally so that it can distinguish genuine downtime from routing and access problems. And you can also use Pingdom.com to monitor both public and password-protected websites, FTP servers, email servers, and any other kind of service that should be accessible from the Internet.

Anyway, so I clicked the link and pushed me to Pingdom.com and immediately their website asked for a URL to test. So in my case I used my personal Blog (maxginez3.com) and see what it has in store for me.

And BINGO, in just a minute or two, it displayed a Speed Test result saying that my website's loading time is 32.34 seconds with a page size of 2MB. So I browsed down below the results and found out that there were 2 culprits swarming around my HTML file that causes the delay. I discovered 2 files from Rankwidget.com

As you can see, the time element is displayed in yellow bar across the results table. It is fairly visible how these  two Rankwidget files slows down my website loading speed.

Rankwidget #1

Rankwidget #2

This is the Rankwidget installed in my Blog which was installed just below the Design Blogs Monitor widget

Here are the available widgets that made me interested to install.

I immediately locate the Rankwidget files on my Layout Settings and remove the  scripts right  away.

This is the second test that I conducted right after the Rankwidgets was removed. 

As you can see on my second speed test, it is obvious that my Blog's loading time dropped from 32.34 seconds to only 6.04 seconds. and the Page size was minimized to 1.7MB and that solved my day.

What I can say about Pingdom is that the user interface is very easy to set up and use. And what is great thing about their uptime monitoring service is that they help us keep our web hosting company honest. And hopefully these actual screen shots I did while using Pingdom will serve as your guide as well on how to figure out your uptime and response time from your server. What Pingdom can offer will serve as a very convincing piece of evidence that will surely solve your problem.

In summary, I have been very pleased with Pingdoms FREE service and perhaps I will continue to to use their service for uptime monitoring of this Blog. I believe the results are reliable and valuable which I think helps me a lot to understand more about designing websites (Coding websites).

I hope you found this article useful and perhaps apply it to your own Blog or website. Who knows you will discover a lot from this experiment. And before I forget, just a friendly advice, don't ever try to install a widget from Rankwidget. If it happened to me, it will happen to you.

Your comments are valuable to me so keep it coming.

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Save Time & Effort with Keystrokes

Although I am not a work at home dad, but I do type a lot, edit a lot and that is why sometimes I do experience wrist pain due to excessive typing. But for Bloggers who spend a lot more with keyboards, or especially if you do freelance writing or work as a transcriptionist.  Then you probably have suffered pain worst than me and have been so tired from typing a lot. So this article will provide some ideas on how to save some keystrokes that would at least help reduce stress on your hands and wrists. It's worth sharing these techniques on how to shorten our time editing an article, letter or whatever we type on a daily basis. I am no different from anybody else who is also a slow typing encoder, so this shortcut  ideas may have just arrived on time.

Using Voice Recognition Software

Even though our keyboard and mouse may have been invented long enough for everyone to become proficient at using them, we could still point out some advantages in using voice operated commands. Voice recognition software has been around for years, I even tried and using it myself (although not all the time) but many people still don't know about the technology and others may still have considered it to be more science fiction than real science. Well basically, a Voice Recognition Software, also known as Speech Recognition Software, has the capability of streamlining your job, allowing you to work as fast as you can speak as compared to the speed of typing and moving the mouse.
So why should we use Voice Recognition Software? The biggest advantage is the ability to work with computers hands-free. And it is also a huge benefit to those who are limited mobility (eg. disability that makes it difficult to use a keyboard and mouse.) Although it may need some time to learn the basics in using the software but as you go along and be familiar with the program you can actually navigate your computer and dictate documents faster than you could ever imagine compared to using with a keyboard and mouse.
If you have installed Windows 7 on your PC, you may just need a microphone (perhaps a headset) to have activated voice recording function, this because Windows 7 has integrated a voice recognition software that you can use to perform a variety of functions, such as opening and closing programs or perhaps browsing the internet and do some document encoding.  Although it is not recommended all the time to use voice recognition because it has also limitations. But if you have to write simple and short letters or emails, the voice recognition software of Windows 7 is already enough to do the job. Or if you may have some budget to purchase a software separately, I could say it is a good investment for serious hard working writer, encoder aor transcriptionist.

Using Text Expander Programs

Have you heard about Phrase Express? Well, this is a great program developed by Bartels Media GmbH (Germany) and has been marketing and developing PC softwares since 1997. Phrase Express is a small yet powerful software that can be used by anyone who’s trying to save keystrokes when they type, because it allows you to create short cuts that you can type, and the phrase that the shortcut represents will automatically populate. Just like an AutoText feature of Google who has used autocomplete, but PhraseExpress offers several useful options, including manual confirmation, delimiters, and expert options. A Web-based manual offered detailed instructions as well as tips so you may need not to worry because instructions are easy. This software saves hours of typing whom I consider a powerful solution for personnel in office, technical support, customer care, help desk, call center and medical or legal transcription settings. A very helpful tool for people who are continually typing the same things over and over and over again, reducing the time spent on the keyboard as well as minimizing spelling mistakes. Aside from that, some imprtant features includes a system-wide spelling correction with more than 10,000 spelling corrections in seven languages. Another feature that I also liked about it  was the ability to Launch programs simply by entering a text shortcut. For example, I would like to use Microsoft Excel, So I just have to type the word "Excel" and presto! A spreadsheet will open. All in all, PhraseExpress proved to be useful to be capable of keeping our work easier, a software not just to like it but use it as well.

Using Document Templates

Document Templates are files that that are designed for us to give us a basic layout of a letter, a form, a spreadsheet, a slideshow, bochure, flyer, etc.... And these templates are very useful specially to those who work for a company or client that has a certain format that they like to be used. And this is where Microsoft and Google are good about, They have prepared templates for us to download and use for free. Although some templates available may have royalty charges of some amount but somehow these templates serve its purpose. To minimize our time in conceptualizing the design rather than creating a file from scratch. But If your client may have specifide template that they use, they may have provided you with it, or they’ll at least provide you with a sample for you to edit. In this way, you will find an idea how to produce the their documents to the format they needed. As a Microsoft Office User myself, I suggest you do saving some templates of your own for future use. But remember, when opening a template file, after editing it or better before editing it, I suggest to save it first as a new document with new filename, otherwise it will be saved as a template again.

Using Internet Browser Keystrokes

Well I guess it would be nice if we also know several shortcut commands that are useful in browsing the web browser to speed up internet usability.

• CTRL+A to select all
• CTRL+C to copy selection
• CTRL+V to paste a selection via clipboard
• CTRL-T to launch a new browser tab page
• CTRL-Enter to type 'www.' and '.com'
• Access the address bar with ALT+D
• Bookmarking a favorite by CTRL+D
• Zoom in and out the page with CTRL+mouse wheel
• Use  Backspace to back one page in your web browser
• Refresh the current web page with F5
• Press  ALT+Home to go to home page
• Cancel  webpage loading by pressing Esc
• Triple-click to highlight-select the entire web address
• Closing your browser CTRL+F4

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Page Rank Benchmarking (Alexa.com)

Monitoring Page Rank status requires hard work, time and a lot of dedication. As a Blog owner, I am very particular with my PR (pagerank), this is because it is a personal fulfillment that my Blog is indeed doing well when compared to 633,706,564 websites all over the world according to netcraft (Internet Services Company based in Bath, England). To the mere fact that my blog is about 7,939,768 based on Alexa Traffic Rank service as of today (May 3, 2013), is already a proof for me and it just shows how my SEO effort was fairly doing well. I may not be that satisfied yet but from this point in time I will be more aggressive to boost my ranking perhaps stepping a much bigger leap from 8 million down to 3 million in few months from now. So I will be having a close monitoring as well as updating my numbers while continuously improving everything around this blog (front end and back-end). Looking back to my old article about the Top 10 SEO Tips for Bloggers, it seems that I really have to do things right according to Pierre Zarokian.

Keeping me updated with this personal task made me decide to install a Google Chrome extension by Alexa.com which can be downloaded by clicking this link. It is a very simple tool yet useful enough for me to to see the ranking of every active website on my browser. Below is an actual screenshot taken by me showing the extension installation was successful.

Once installed, an Alexa icon appears right next to the Google Chrome control button located on the topmost right corner of the browser. What is good about this extension is that in every website that I visit, I just click Alexa button and presto a summary review appears. The following image is another screenshot showing the pagerank review of ABS-CBN.com (TV Network) whom I selected because for me it is one of the best website that I could benchmark myself since this site is located in the Philippines.

For the benefit of the many who I believe doesn't have the idea of Page Ranking, I would rather explain a little bit further how this system works. Google PageRank was developed at Standford University by Larry Page, and Sergery Brin. This was part of a research project for these two individuals. The project was started in 1995 and then was led to a functional prototype. And in 1998, the Google Company was founded, and as of October 2012, the Company has a market cap of $250 billion, making it the largest internet information provider in the world. The revenues of Google are primarily derives from its online content advertisement (Google Adwords and Adsense to name a few). And as an internet & software conglomerate, the company is battling several other industry giants such as Microsoft. Nevertheless, thanks to the growing number of internet users, Google's revenues experienced an annualized growth rate of 30% in the last 5 years. So if you have invested some few bucks to Google for the last 10 years, you might be a couple of times richer than today.

The word PageRank is a patented technology that Google uses in order to determine the "weight" of a website. That means in every inbound link to a site is treated as a "vote" for that site from the site that has a link. Therefore, the more inbound links a site has, the more "votes" it gains and, therefore, is ranked higher. So if you want to learn more and go deeper with this technology, you can visit webworkshop.net and see how the real mathematics work.

Now alright then, let's go back to Alexa.com and why is it that I used this website tool for my page ranking. For me, Alexa is one of the best website that enables us to see what's the highest/most visited site on the Internet today. They even offer a lot of free tools that can be used to check the status of your website, such as the Chrome extension that I mentioned awhile ago. They provide real time statistics of the best websites available, it's no wonder that people rely on them for information. Alexa has given a power to the people to leave reviews and to view traffic information. This is a good place to see how a website is doing from a traffic standpoint as well as seeing what the most popular websites in the world and each country are. It's a great way to find a popular website that you have not checked out for some reason. One of my favorite feature on Alexa would have to be the audience demographic results. It breaks down into categories like age, gender, education, has children, and browsing location. And there is also an advanced feature of the audience demographic results, but you have to download & install their toolbar to see the results. Having these website services at our disposal and for the most part it is FREE, have given us the power to monitor, improve with site audits which you pay for, precise research, counterintelligence and much much more. Tracking your competition is important especially for young and upcoming websites. The point of this review is, research needs to have an articulate body that in the end will help us to reach a conclusion and point of direction. Go and give it a try, it's worth checking out!

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Analyzing Traffic - Referring URLs and Sites

 After activating yesterday’s Traffic Exchange idea, this morning as I opened my PC, I immediately checked my Blog Statistics to see the effects of that action. But before doing that, I first checked my Alexa Page Rank and as of this writing today, my number is 8,046,676 a quite high of course but if we will compare the result from yesterday was 8,048,474. That means we have a difference of 1,798 counts. I got it by subtracting yesterdays result from todays number. So I guess I made a little advantage (not Bad for a little effort). Let us all understand that when we talk about Page Ranking, the Smaller the number the better. I signed in for my blogger account, click the Stats and then click for Traffic Sources, then a bar graph is displayed showing the referring URLs and websites. The first table is about referring URLs shown on the screenshot image below. This table is composed of 3 columns referred to as the ENTRY, No. of Page views followed by the graphical presentation.

The second table shows the referring Websites in its simplified URL address.

Actually, let us not underestimate our physical offline sources like print ads (flyers & brochures), business cards, newspaper ads, books or magazines, billboard, by word of mouth that mentions your website or business. Because as we all know, if our Blog or Company Name is already known in public, people will just simply search for you on search engines. And by that, they will reach you.

As far as my personal understanding about URL referrals, getting actual traffic are taken basically from search engines by keyword optimization (SEO) with Luck to be displayed on top of the searched results. Another is through weblogs, link lists from other sites and if you have paid for online advertisements perhaps from banner ads. And perhaps if your Blog is good and you build a frequent readers or subscribers, some people may have bookmarked your URL and visit from time to time to see what’s new. There is also what they call from Email Marketing coming from Bulk email senders used by online marketers and the like. Getting Affiliate links are also a source of referring URLs as well as Social Media that is currently one of the best advertising platform available today. I think these techniques that I mentioned drives visitors to your Web site. I will write more of this soon dissecting every technique in detail.

One thing that I would like to discuss is that in some cases, you will receive a FREE URL referral from Blogger Blogs. If we will observe an uncustomized Blogger blog, above the header is a NavBar (Navigation Bar) that if it is not switched off it will show a Link on the right side saying Next Blog. The function of this Link is that for example we are browsing Blog A, the Next Blog Link is directed to another blog. And if you are fortunate enough this could be your blog (because Blogger generates these links randomly), or pointing to any of thousands of blogs available under Blogger. So if the visitor to Blog A clicks on the Next Blog link and so it happens to be your blog, then you get a FREE referral from Blog A’s URL. For Blogger.com users, this is one reason our Blog gets a hit. Just pray more that Google might pick your Blog more often.
In a SEO’s point of view, chances are you'll want to know what terms (KEYWORDS) that people have searched for and finding your site on search engines, so you need to analyze that information in a much deeper manner. Those terms/keywords are then used to optimize your website so that your website will be on top on the searched result.

As I go along with this hobby of mine (Self-proclaimed computer geek) I found myself of becoming a Search Engine Optimizer (did I say what?). Anyway, that Job will do things that make it easy for you or someone or some thing (I’m referring to a Search Engine) to flow through an optimized website. Making it easy should I say to establish a searchable website so that people can read rich contents and understand the message, perhaps to interact with others and exchange opinions, to sell or purchase products, and or as simple as achieving whatever goal we aimed for.

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