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Third Party Services Slow Website Performance

Over the past few years, ecommerce sites have made a concerted effort to improve their shopping experience. Most ecommerce sites employ third party gizmos to add features like chat, recommendations, reviews, personalization and localization. The problem is, these third party scripts extract a cost: inconsistent website performance. The Growth of Third Party Services With the …

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The Tracker Tax: How Third Party Trackers Impact Website Speed in the United States

Personal consumer data has become the oil of the 21st century. American companies are expected to spend close to $20 billion on consumer data in 2018 (New York Times 2018). Data trackers are the main way advertisers gather this valuable consumer data. Trackers are small JavaScripts used by advertisers like Google and Facebook to monitor …

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Case Study: Teachthought.com Dedicated Server Upgrade

In website performance, upgrading your server is often the most cost-effective improvement you can make. Switching from an overloaded mass web host can significantly speed up your site. More popular sites can switch to a dedicated server to boost performance (and not slow down other sites). In upgrading your server, not only do you benefit from faster hardware, but server configuration and software limitations disappear. In this article we benchmark the performance of upgrading a popular site (TeachThought.com) from shared to a dedicated server (see Figure 1).

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Empirical Study of Web Site Speed on Search Engine Rankings – website performance and seo rankings

Having search engine visibility is critical for website success. Search visibility is due to many ranking factors, including speed. Until recently the effects of website performance on rankings have been poorly understood. This article summarizes an empirical study of web site load times on search rankings. The study found that website crawl time and its variability correlates with search ranking position.

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Healthcare.gov One Year Performance Review

Millions of Americans wanting to enroll in Obamacare use the healthcare.gov official website. Just over one year ago, health care consumers were directed to log on to the healthcare.gov website starting on October 1, 2013. The healthcare.gov website experienced growing pains after its initial launch. Starting November 15, 2014 citizens were directed to the healthcare.gov website to enroll or reapply to avoid penalties for not having “minimum essential coverage.” This article compares the website performance of healthcare.gov one year later. How does the popular site fare after one year of improvements?

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Case Study: PhiladelphiaOrthodontists.com Mobile Responsive Redesign

Responsive web site design is the practice of laying out your website with DIVs and CSS rules to work seamlessly on both desktop and mobile devices. Responsive designs transform the same content using CSS to linearize layouts, hide features, and create mobile-friendly buttons and click-to-call features useful on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. This article shows a case study of PhiladelphiOrthodontists.com which was converted from a static HTML site to a WordPress responsive site.

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Case Study: Walkerworldtrade.com Server Upgrade

Website performance issues can often be traced to inadequate or overloaded hosting. Upgrading to a faster server is one of the easiest ways to improve website performance. This article uses Google Analytics to document the speed increases from moving Walkerworldtrade.com from conventional shared hosting to higher speed shared hosting (see Figure 1).

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Form Conversion Rate Optimization

Optimizing conversion rates is a great way to boost your leads without spending more on advertising. Your website’s conversion rate is the percentage of people that “drink the koolaid” and click, buy, download, or subscribe to a call to action. Forms and shopping carts are an ideal place to apply conversion rate optimization techniques. This article shows how form simplification and speed can boost conversion rates by more than 90%.

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Upgrade to a Faster Server: Results

Last time we explored the effects of upgrading to a faster server on the home page of PhillyDentistry.com. We found a significant improvement in response times for the home page, over 60% faster in first paint times and nearly 30% faster in load times. This time we look deeper into the effects of the faster server on the performance and audience behavior for the entire web site.

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Upgrade to a Faster Server

By now, everyone knows the value of speed on the Web. Higher conversions, less frustration, more loyalty, and as of 2010 higher rankings on Google can all be had with a faster web site. You can, of course, optimize your content for more speed. But how much does the performance of your hosting effect the speed of your website? This article tests the effects of a new screamingly fast server on a client’s website.

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