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Dealer.com Site Performance

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#21
Jerry Thibeau said:
Joe, you need to peddle faster!
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, they dropped the peddle function in HTML 4.

StuckInTheMud.com and CarChat24.com both seem to be very close to each other in performance and optimization. They both load fairly quickly, even given their large page size (600-900KB). At this point, I'd say they're both at the 80/20 rule - you'll need to do 80% more work for 20% more gain, but given how many graphics are used, especially on StuckInTheMud, the first thing I'd look into is hosting images, CSS and JavaScript files on a separate server. Browsers/Servers are limited to 2 concurrent connections, so at any time, only 2 files can be downloaded at a time per domain name. That means if your HTML, JS, CSS and images are all hosted on www.carchat24.com, there is going to be a lot of queueing going on. By moving the images, JS and CSS to alternate domain names, or even just sub domains, you can really impact the speed in which things appear to display.

The easiest thing to do is to test it out with CSS and JS. Create a sub domain, like content.carchat24.com and host your javascript and CSS files there and see how the impact is. Then move on to images if you feel it necessary. It doesn't need to be a separate server, you can just create a new instance on the same server.

It's not something we currently employ at DealerRater except on our classified ad inventory photos, but our pages are also < 200KB on average. We also utilize explicit client side caching and content expirations so once a user has requested a static file (JS, CSS, images...) they don't have to keep requesting them. We had to install software on the server to do this correctly as Microsoft IIS does a really bad job at it on its own.

For StuckInTheMud, the homepage has so much content on it that the file size really creeps up, although most of that content requires user interaction (clicking on a tab). Instead of loading all that content in at the time of load, if it were my site I'd probably test out using AJAX to load that content in at the time of the click.

I'm not sure of the server optimization on either site, but if they're feeding in dynamic content, especially to the homepage, I'd make sure I was using server side caching to help reduce the load on the database and make the page really pop on load.

HTH,

Chip-
 
#23
Chip Grueter said:
Unfortunately, they dropped the peddle function in HTML 4.

StuckInTheMud.com and CarChat24.com both seem to be very close to each other in performance and optimization. They both load fairly quickly, even given their large page size (600-900KB). At this point, I'd say they're both at the 80/20 rule - you'll need to do 80% more work for 20% more gain, but given how many graphics are used, especially on StuckInTheMud, the first thing I'd look into is hosting images, CSS and JavaScript files on a separate server. ..snip...

I'm not sure of the server optimization on either site, but if they're feeding in dynamic content, especially to the homepage, I'd make sure I was using server side caching to help reduce the load on the database and make the page really pop on load.

HTH,

Chip-
Click to expand...

Chip,

TY for your review, wow, what an asset this community is, ty!

Your advice lines up with info I found yesterday using Google's FF plug-in called "Page Speed". It suggested many optimization steps including "parallelize downloads across hostnames". Your right on the money Chip, TY!

"Call Me Now" button = 40 thumbnails.
One problem my site design has is too many images loading. The design has 144 images to load and 40 of them are sales reps thumbnails. These 40 load on every single page as they are connected to my "Call Me Now" button at the top center of all pages.

QUESTION:
Will a "no follow" tag on that Call Me Now button work? Is there another/better workaround? I was going to pull the reps from that button, but I ck'd the stats, 60% of the "call me now's" are directed to a specific rep, so I'll have to keep that feature.
 
#24
Hey Joe,
Just as an FYI, when I went back to check out that "Call Me Now" button I got redirected to www.usedcarking.mobi - even though I'm on my home PC (Windows 7 64, IE8). FireFox is fine.

Anyway, that Call Me Now button is a perfect place to use AJAX to load in the content at the time of click and not on every page. Using no-follow on internal links isn't as useful anymore as Google stopped the ability for sites to PageRank sculpt. And since it's a "pop up" I don't think you have to worry about it getting indexed.

But at about 2KB per thumbnail, AJAX would be an easy way to drop 80KB off that initial page load. Then I might do the same with the "Looking for a Deal" box.

With those changes, you'll be knocking off 80KB on the initial load and then streaming in about 60KB once the rest of the page loads.

Chip-
 
#27
TY Chip!

Chip Grueter said:
Hey Joe,
Just as an FYI, when I went back to check out that "Call Me Now" button I got redirected to www.usedcarking.mobi - even though I'm on my home PC (Windows 7 64, IE8). FireFox is fine.

Anyway, that Call Me Now button is a perfect place to use AJAX to load in the content at the time of click and not on every page. Using no-follow on internal links isn't as useful anymore as Google stopped the ability for sites to PageRank sculpt. And since it's a "pop up" I don't think you have to worry about it getting indexed.

But at about 2KB per thumbnail, AJAX would be an easy way to drop 80KB off that initial page load. Then I might do the same with the "Looking for a Deal" box.

With those changes, you'll be knocking off 80KB on the initial load and then streaming in about 60KB once the rest of the page loads.

Chip-
Click to expand...
 
#28
JoePistell said:
WOW! Mitch, your Dealer.com site is SMOKIN fast! One of the fastest I've ever seen, under 2 seconds!
Pingdom Tools


Dealer.com has your home page set as: Precision Acura of Princeton - Trenton, Lawrenceville, East Brunswick, Bridgewater, New Jersey, and Langhorne, PA. Look at the redirects if you plug in just: precisionacura.com Pingdom Tools

:bow:Hail to Dealer.com... I am not worthy!
Click to expand...

2.5 seconds - not bad at all :thumbup:

By the way Mitch, it is easy to tell there are two very different graphic design people who worked on your site.
 
#30
Chip Grueter said:
Hey Joe,
Just as an FYI, when I went back to check out that "Call Me Now" button I got redirected to www.usedcarking.mobi - even though I'm on my home PC (Windows 7 64, IE8). FireFox is fine.
Click to expand...

Just wanted to follow up on this. So apparently Dealer.com is redirecting users to the mobile site when it finds "pda" in the User Agent String. Not uncommon, however for anyone who has a Creative Labs soundcard and has updated their software within the last 3 months, Creative has added in a string to the User Agent for some unknown reason. The string is "Creative AutoUpdate". Why does this matter?

Creative AutoUpdate

It appears as though dealer.com is doing some sort of:
if instring(user agent, "pda") then
redirect to mobile

I'm seeing more and more blog posts about this, so I would imagine it will gain some real attention soon. Hopefully website providers can fine-tune their mobile device check a bit to have it only redirect when the word is PDA and not part of another word.

Chip-
 
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