[Jarrett]

Hello all,

Just went live with some dealer.com sites and am happy with their product and support. I think they do a nice job.

Page load time for us is pretty lagged out / slow. I have added some analytic and mail tracking includes but have them on other sites that have excellent load times.

Is anyone else on their platform experiencing slow load times?

[Billfred]

I just checked our sister stores on dealer.com, and they seem to be running fairly slow as well. Might not be just you.

[Shereef]

We provide service for around 60 dealers that use dealer.com, and I think the slow load time is the norm with dealer.com sites that have any volume of content. The stripped basic site seems to load in a decent time. One of the slowest ones we provide service for is http://www.clearwatertoyota.com This is a Sonic dealer, and sonic loads there sites up with everything dealer.com offers as well as the black book video greeting. Maybe dealer.com needs to add some more servers, or upgrade the ones they are currently using. On a positive note: I have had a lot of good feedback from the dealers that use them. Their sites seem to have a better lead conversion rate then most of their competitors, and all of my personal dealings with them have been excellent.

[Chip Grueter]

Hey Shereef,
The Clearwater homepage is 2.6 megabytes in size. Subsequent pages average around 1 megabyte each. Even on broadband, that is going to appear to be slow loading. It is also using gzip compression which is good, but with bigger file sizes it will make pages appear to load slower as the whole page needs to download first, then unzip on the client side, before anything is shown. On bigger pages, this can come off as feeling laggy. With such a graphic heavy page, I'd probably look into disabling gzip as the extra 100KB isn't going to make a bit of a difference out of 2.6MB and getting the first visible byte on the page is more important.

Something to play around with.

Chip-

[Shereef]

Originally Posted by Chip Grueter

Hey Shereef,
The Clearwater homepage is 2.6 megabytes in size. Subsequent pages average around 1 megabyte each. Even on broadband, that is going to appear to be slow loading. It is also using gzip compression which is good, but with bigger file sizes it will make pages appear to load slower as the whole page needs to download first, then unzip on the client side, before anything is shown. On bigger pages, this can come off as feeling laggy. With such a graphic heavy page, I'd probably look into disabling gzip as the extra 100KB isn't going to make a bit of a difference out of 2.6MB and getting the first visible byte on the page is more important.

Something to play around with.

Chip-

Thx Chip, I will forward this info to the dealer....

[Alex Snyder]

When we redesigned Checkered Flag - New & Used Car Dealers | Virginia Beach - Norfolk, Virginia load time was certainly a factor on the homepage. Our old homepage had flash in it and a RSS feed that severely slowed it down. The new site loads much faster, but I think dealer websites as a whole have a tendency to be slow. I'm not sure whether that is our vendors, our inherent need to put absolutely everything on our home pages, or a combination.

[Patrick80639]

We recently switched to dealer.com from reyrey and our new site is much slower as well, but of course looks much better. I'm hoping this a temporary issue as I remember dealer.com sites loading pretty quickly throughout much of last year.

[mattwatson81]

To help diagnose this problem you can use a FireFox plug-in called FireBug that will show you all the images, css, javascript and other files that have to be downloaded. But it will also show you how long it takes to download just the HTML itself which is the first key performance indicator. The problem could be the home page being slow, or it could be a javascript file that is taking forever that is from your live chat provider or something. So you really have to analyze the traffic and the pieces. You can also look at the total load time.

I just went to checkeredflag.com and it took 1 second to return the basic HTML of the page which is pretty good, but it took 8 seconds to load all the images combined. Which is still pretty good.

I tried clear water toyota and it took over 45 seconds to load all the files, but the home page html itself was only 0.7 seconds which is good. They just have a lot of add ons like the talking avatar that slow it down.

It is usually all the videos, pictures, flash, live chat, talking avatars, web stats and other junk that gets piled on the home page.

[JoePistell]

Ouch.Pingdom Tools
First site I ever saw timeout. Not good.

Interesting topic for your 'ol uncle Joe. This month, I am on an all out attack on site speed and I think there is ROI in it.

Google Gospel: YOUR FAST OR YOUR LAST
Google has made it known loud and clear that they are all about offering the BEST user search experience possible. They have made it known that they have undeniable data that shows that shoppers hate slow sites. Google gospel: Slow = bad.

More proof? Google has a quality score in it's AdWords system. If the advertisers page has a poor quality score, you pay MORE for position than the guy with a higher quality landing page. Page load speed is one factor in Google's quality scoring system.

Get in your vendors grill!
If you have a Google account, with the WebMaster tools on your site, go to:
webmaster tools > dashboard > labs > site performance

I remember the first day I saw the chart, I said "ohoh... goog's putting out the word GET FAST OR YOUR LAST"

I am one full week into the project, home page load time has dropped by >50%, but we're still way off. Here is this morning's email to my guys working on site speed improvements.

Week One Review
Google 1/6/10 Performance overview
On average, pages in your site take 4.8 seconds to load This is slower than 72% of sites.

Google 12/29/09 Performance overview
On average, pages in your site take 7.6 seconds to load This is slower than 87% of sites.

[JoePistell]

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