Why is Dangerous Intersection such a slow-loading website?

Why is Dangerous Intersection such a slow-loading website?

[UPDATE: If you can see this update, you are now on DI’s new faster server, and the rest of this post is moot.]

I’m painfully aware of the problem, which is being caused by problems with our current hosting, an upgrade to a new design and growing traffic, which now brings us about 6,000 visitors every day.

Image by A.Poulos (Iya) at Flickr
Image by A.Poulos (Iya) at Flickr via Creative Commons

I’m writing to let readers know that in a few days,  we will be transferring this website to a new host, and this will provide much faster page-loading.

This problem with our site loading slowly (and repeatedly crashing over the past 6 weeks) raised an interesting question:  How important is it to user that a site loads quickly?  Extremely important.  Consider these statistics:

Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks. Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% . . .

I hope that within the next few days, we’ll all see dramatically increased speed on this website.  In the meantime, thank you for your patience.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 2 Comments

  1. Avatar of Karl
    Karl

    Because of all of the creationist/theistic advertising I see when my version of the sight loads in.

    Apparently google is selectively able to determine your advertising interest/need and thus accordingly selects its latest ads to present in the ad windows.

    Is Eric going capitalistic or simply co-opting his efforts and his impatience with creationists?

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