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I call it the “white screen of death”.
For the past week, I’ve sporadically encountered a white warning message from my host when attempting to get to my blog. According to the folks at HostICan, I had mysteriously used too much CPU processing time.
Clearly, this was a major issue. If the site was down, I couldn’t update my blog, visitors couldn’t visit and websites would go unoptimized. Think of the wasted money!
My problem cost me time and visitors. Yours could be costing you revenue and conversion. Read on for my cautionary tale about…
Site and Image Speed Optimization
I started sending frantic emails to HostICan to try to understand and resolve the errors. Their first suggestion was to install the WP Super Cache plugin for Wordpress.
That was a nifty idea, but I couldn’t even log into my blog. Eventually, the CPU usage finally dipped and I activated said plugin. No luck.
Their initial response was to encourage me to buy a virtual private server…. at $45/month. As much as I enjoy blogging, I could think of better ways to spend $540 (mmm… iPhone).
HostICan’s next suggestion was to optimize my SQL database. I like to think that, owing to my analytics background, I’m a bit more technically than the usual internet marketer. Still, this was over my head.
They said they optimized it for me, but the problem persisted. Finally, I asked the golden question, “What is the root cause of this issue?”. I was tired of medicating symptoms.
After a little digging, here’s what they said…
[28/Jan/2008:00:09:51 -0500] 216.58.96.134 www.alexlcohen.com /home/alexlcoh/public_html
/index.php 0.617905 0.617905 - it means that process has taken 1+ minute. That’s enough high for shared hosting.
Aha! Something was up with my homepage. Now, to investigate.
Diagnosing a Site Speed Problem
Before I talk about how I diagnosed the problem, let’s take a trip back in time.
After spending many an hour banging on the keyboard, I was shocked (shocked!) that my massive blog post about a website analysis process didn’t get more organic search traction after I wrote it.
I wanted to understand the competition a little bit, so I dug into Compete Search Analytics to see who was winning for the phrase “website analysis” (which, of course, I should have done first).
I was actually surprised by the list. It was dominated by sites that offered tools to identify issues with your website: broken links, code validation and, drum roll please, site speed.
After encountering that white error screen, I gave two of the tools a try: UITest and SiteReportCard.
UI Test is basically a site optimization portal. You enter your URL once and you get a list of links that take you directly to an assessment from another tool about your site. This was a useful jumping off point, but it didn’t provide enough detailed information.
SiteReportCard is a bit more direct; simply enter your URL and get a 1-10 score covering 6 different areas:
- Link Check
- HTML Check
- Load Time Check
- Meta Tag Check
- Spell Check
- Keyword Check
Most of my numbers were good, if not honor roll material. Site speed, however, stood out like a sore thumb–a 1 out of 10.
SiteReportCard will give you detail about your pages overall download speed and the negative effect of your images. To fix my problem, I needed more.
Fixing Site Speed Problems
I remembered stumbling upon Web Page Speed Report (from WebsiteOptimization). This tools specializes in diagnosing potential page speed issues and, most importantly, itemizes everything that is slowing down your site and recommends limits.
I noticed that images were taking a lot of time download, so I stripped extra images from the footer and sidebar. That trimmed things a bit, but not much.
The real image culprit was my big picture about website analysis process. After fooling around with a few tools, I settled on IrfanView. Trimming the image and reducing its color depth cut about 30% from the size.
The report also showed some HTTP requests for plugins I didn’t need. I deactivated them in Wordpress.
Still, I wasn’t getting the big drop I needed. Looking over the list, I saw a whole bunch of requests and load time for 1 plugin–Gregarious.
Gregarious is a slick plugin that lets people submit my site to a variety of social bookmarking sites with one AJAX drop down menu. Sadly, it was hogging CPU time.
I started by pruning the list of social bookmarking sites people could choose in the drop-down. I knew from my analytics which ones had referred traffic.
Then I noticed an option I had never considered before: whether or not to include Gregarious on the front page of the blog vs. just at the end of posts.
I switched off the front page option and BAM, http requests decreased by 15 and I achieved an instant, noticeable improvement in site speed.
Even then I was still occasionally getting error messages from HostICan. I replaced heavy images with smaller ones, cut some out and moved the large website analysis method image inside the post.
I also chose to turn Gregarious off for the time being and cut out some more images. I noticed that Google Analyticator, the plugin I use to get the GA code on my site, added an extra script for tracking of clicks on outbound links. This isn’t vital information, so I disabled the option.
I’m starting the search for a sleeker, more lightweight theme to keep things as efficient and elegant as possible.
Conclusion
I was actually kind of lucky to have accidentally stumbled upon an issue that could have been annoying visitors to my site for months.
You might not be so lucky.
Take 30 seconds to check the speed of your blog or key pages (e.g. homepage). Make sure to comment and report back anything surprising.
