Secrets of Website Performance

Dotcom-Monitor® today announced the general availability of its Uptime Meter, a new tool to monitor and display a website’s uptime and performance in 30-minute intervals. Dotcom-Monitor®’s Uptime Meter is available free-for-download at Dotcom-Monitor®’s site.

Dotcom-Monitor®’s Uptime Meter tool provides customers a unique, easy-to-use, targeted solution for quickly monitoring and validating uptime that affects website performance and revenues. The Uptime Meter is designed to aggregate uptime and automatically update and display the results on the user’s website via the Uptime Meter Button. The Uptime Meter Button displays accurate update metrics, such as “Uptime 99.999%”, based on the aggregated data since the date of original implementation.

The Uptime Meter provides the following benefits to small and medium-sized businesses:

* Validating the uptime dependability and usability of the website for visitors
* Demonstrating integration with an independent third-party uptime company
* Ensuring Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are met
* Proving details of uptime are available to users and website owners
* Demonstrating a corporate commitment to delivering a high-quality website experience

“For many smaller companies just starting out, monitoring is an important next step in validating their website infrastructure and business reliability,” said Vadim Mazo, CTO and Founder of Dotcom-Monitor®. “Five-nines website uptime and performance is synonymous with business success. Using Dotcom-Monitor®’s Uptime Meter, which is fast becoming an industry standard as an independent third-party, provides organizations with a free tool to validate their commitment to website uptime and website user experience.”

The Dotcom-Monitor® user has access to all website performance and uptime analytics by simply clicking on the Uptime Meter Button displayed on their website. Full-color, detailed website uptime reports are available, including: uptime and performance according to monitoring locations, uptime/downtime, response times, response times by task, distribution by Day of Week, and Distribution by Hour of the Day. When implementing the Uptime Meter, administrators can select from a variety of Uptime Meter Button colors to compliment their website color scheme and brand attributes.

The Uptime Meter is available at http://dotcom-monitor.com/StampEdit.aspx

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WordPress platform is perfect for everyday blogging, it’s easy to install and use, but only until your posts begin attracting public attention. As soon as your blog becomes popular, it takes more and more time for the pages to load and of course your readers don’t like this. Gradually you start hating all the shiny features that WordPress usually boasts of.

At this point you become concerned about your blog performance. Good news – there are many things to tune in WordPress to make it work faster. Today I want to share several tips that will make your blog perform better.

First, let’s talk about WordPress plugins. The first what you have to do is disable all unused plugins. They consume RAM and CPU and leave less to your visitors. That’s why, disable everything you don’t need. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 19% [?]

Popularity: 27% [?]

There are 6 basic strategies to improve your website performance.  I am going to name them in this post and describe them more thoroughly in my future materials. Of course, you cannot boost your website performance if you do only one thing. But if you succeed in at least 3 – your site’s visitors will definitely appreciate your effort!

Here are the strategies:

1. Objects size Minimization. Make sure your (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript files occupy as little space as possible. Trim white spaces, remove line breaks and comments. Of course, you don’t need to do everything manually – there are a lot of free tools available on the Internet.  Don’t also forget to minimize the filesize of your JPEG/GIF/PNG images. A part of this strategy is GZIP compression.

2. Objects caching – this is a server-side technique. There are many ways to cache your files, we’ll discuss them later.

3. Objects merging – this is very easy. The HTTP requests you do, the less time it takes to load your page. Therefore – use CSS sprites, merge JavaScript and CSS files into one large files – this makes your pages really faster.

4. Simultaneous objects loading – as you probably know, your browser keep only 2 simultaneous connections to one host open. If you add an additional server to keep your images and other static files, you can win up to 30% boost.

5. CSS and JavaScript objects optimization. It can be a real pain to optimize JavaScript files written by someone else, but the result will be visible, especially if your site grows to 10.000 uniques per day and more.

Popularity: 15% [?]