Your team explains that there's a database system running now and pages take longer to load. They can add more RAM to your shared hosting account, but some of the caching features of the system just don't seem to be performing optimally. Often times, with shared hosting this is the case. It just doesn't work - or better yet it totally breaks the site. Caching is just one of the things which may be slowing your site down. We'll look at a few of the common ones - bottlenecks, code issues, and caching (or lack thereof). We aren't going to get in to database indexing etc, as this can be rather specific to your actual case. Kissmetrics - another platform for measuring behavioural data suggests 40% of your visitors will leave if your page takes more than three seconds to load.

So your developer adds more horsepower to your hosting package and it seems faster to you, but still it's taking its good ole time to load. Every morning it's like waking the dead to visit the home page and check the company news. Now you're on a slightly more expensive hosting account with more features, and maybe website caching works but it's still not as fast as this new, awesome site should be. I guess adding more horsepower helped but only a tiny bit. If there's any number of people on the site, it's really slowing down though.

This is where a lot of value comes in to play. Your development team has strapped a bunch of community contributed modules and plugins in order to create your site. In most cases, as sites are developed, your team is not actually keeping an eye on a module they may have added which is slow, or getting called too many times in a page load. At some point they may notice things have slowed or they may not. Usually that level of testing wouldn't be done until they're on the deployment server with certain settings optimized for your live site. The technical folks on your team building the site should have an understanding of what's actually being loaded, when, and why. Especially in the case where something is going awry. Often times this is where teams run into issues, as they can use the tools when they're working but if something comes up requiring a fix, or specific attention they're in the dust reaching for help everywhere online.

For actual application streamlining we work primarily with the New Relic suite of optimization and streamlining tools. These tools allow our developers to understand what's working and what's not. It's a lot like your automobile mechanic using diagnostic tools in order to find what's wrong with your car. Profiling a website is an important part of understanding where there are performance bottlenecks, and fixing them. These tools will help lead your technical team to problems they're able to address. Pantheon's integration with New Relic is simply amazing. It allows us to retain metrics for our client websites and not only be informed about performance, but get another level of insight around user data. This data - in combination with other analytical information allows our teams to make informed decisions about where to steer your online presence next.

Website maintenance, optimization and iterative improvements are a huge part of how we've built some long lasting relationships. We do regular streamlining of our client websites to make sure we're not serving up un-necessarily slow pages. We're also keeping most of our client sites running silky smooth and rocket fast with Varnish and in many cases - highly customized performance modifications to make sure we're delivering pages to your users as fast as possible.