'Slow' is a relative term. What may seem slow to you could be completely fine for another customer experiencing the same site speed. Since it's impossible to determine what is slow for everyone it may be more helpful to fine tune your site to be as fast as it can possibly be.

Connectivity

Connectivity issues often cause sites to appear slow when they may not actually be running slow at all. We have a resource that we suggest to help you determine if there is an issue with your connectivity or if there is another issue.

Internet Supervision

Internet Supervision is a free website testing tool. You simply enter your website URL into the provided field and select 'Check URL'. It will then connect to your site from various places all over the world so you can see if it is your connectivity or if it is something more.

If your site connects to other locations around the world in a timely manner, then it is most likely your connection or your route to our servers. In either case you would need to contact your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

TraceRoute & PingPlotter

If you would like us to help you find the exact location that is causing your site to appear slow, submit a ticket and include your trace route. Our Linux Administrators will then review the route, determine exactly where the the lag is coming from and let you know where to point your ISP.

Run a Windows TraceRoute

1. Go to dos prompt by clicking START > RUN, type in cmd and hit ENTER

2. Type in "tracert yourdomain.com" and hit ENTER. Change yourdomain.com to your actual domain name

3. When it has finished, and even if it looks as though it is going to hang, allow it to finish, right click in window and select MARK

4. Then select all of the text on the dos screen and hit ENTER

5. Paste the reply into your ticket to us

Run a Mac OS X TraceRoute

1. Go to Applications -> Utilities folder

2. Open Network Utility

3. Click Traceroute tab and enter your domain

4. Paste the output in your ticket to us

Site Design

Site design is one of the biggest culprits behind a site running slow. Since we are not a web design company, our expertise here is limited; however, we can suggest a resource to help you find out how your site measures up to average speeds.

GTmetrix

You can use a tool called GTmetrix. Simply enter your site URL into the Analyze Performance of field and select Go! GTmetrix will then analyze your site and give you a grade for general page speed and Yahoo!'s YSlow tool. You can also see your exact page load time.

You can also get more details on exactly why you received the grade you received for both page speed and YSlow, as well as a timeline of how long it took each aspect of the page to load and when in your history was your best load time.

Using this tool, you should easily be able to optimize your site to be as fast as possible. GTmetrix will also show you any site flaws so you can adjust your coding and condense large files that are causing slow speeds.

Server is Running Slow

Our goal is to have every server running perfectly; however, sometimes a server may run slower than normal due to a variety of reasons. You can rest assure we are aware of all of them and are constantly monitoring to make sure your server is running at its optimal level at all times.