Does speed matter?

[Mik.]

So does the speed of your forum matter to you? Do you like being on slow forums?

Speed of the forums is something crucial members want. I don't think people like waiting after clicking on something on your forum or maybe after replying to a thread. I don't at all like being on slow forums.

/Discuss

 

[USHost247]

Of course speed is everything, it's the reason people buy broadband cable internet instead of dial-up. 😉

 

[Mik.]

Not exactly for your general internet but your website's/forum's speed.

Some forums you may visit can be real slow compared to others.

 

[USHost247]

Not exactly for your general internet but your website's/forum's speed.

Some forums you may visit can be real slow compared to others.

True, speed is everything to me. I need to be able to blaze through and get to a topic if need to.

 

[Deleted member 7467]

I like fast forums as the ones that are slow really tick me off and I end up leaving.

 

[Mik.]

I like fast forums as the ones that are slow really tick me off and I end up leaving.

That is absolutely true BB. That is why its crucial for forums to have speed.

 

[The Elite]

Yeah, speed matters. I attempt to keep my forums at 1-2 seconds per page.

 

[Mik.]

TheElite, thats pretty good. There multiple ways to speed up your vBulletin Forum. When I was on vB I did and it helped a TON! I used multiple add-ons and tuned up the style a bit.

 

[Mr.Paine]

Speed is key. You could have the best forum but if it takes a minute to load people will get feed up and leave.

 

[AnAccount]

I know my tech-administrator and I were getting quite fed up with our slow loading times at Chatting Time, so yes, a decent loading speed is crucial no matter what sort of forum you're running. Unfortunately, our host can't afford a dedicated server, and I don't want to switch hosts because Ashley.S. and the gang have done so much for me already, and I'm more than comfortable with them, so I've learned to live with what we got. They do server reboots every now and again, so that does help somewhat. It is annoying, but when your host can't afford a dedicated server, and you can't afford to switch hosts, there's not much else you can do, really. It does annoy me greatly when I'm on other peoples' forums and those load ungodly slow though, but like I said, sometimes it can't be helped no matter what you do.

 

[Mik.]

I know my tech-administrator and I were getting quite fed up with our slow loading times at Chatting Time, so yes, a decent loading speed is crucial no matter what sort of forum you're running. Unfortunately, our host can't afford a dedicated server, and I don't want to switch hosts because Ashley.S. and the gang have done so much for me already, and I'm more than comfortable with them, so I've learned to live with what we got. They do server reboots every now and again, so that does help somewhat. It is annoying, but when your host can't afford a dedicated server, and you can't afford to switch hosts, there's not much else you can do, really. It does annoy me greatly when I'm on other peoples' forums and those load ungodly slow though, but like I said, sometimes it can't be helped no matter what you do.

Aw man that sucks. If you don't mind sharing what host you're on? Also, maybe suggest to your host do a server clean up where they purge inactive accounts. That helps out the host a lot and may speed things up.

 

[Mr.Paine]

There on Pluto Hosting a sever clean up could help.

 

[Kevin X Dragon]

Speed is very important to me and millions of other people. Now days nobody will wait more than 5-10 seconds for a site to load. One of the main reason I choice XenForo is because how fast and light weight it is.

 

[AnAccount]

I know my tech-administrator and I were getting quite fed up with our slow loading times at Chatting Time, so yes, a decent loading speed is crucial no matter what sort of forum you're running. Unfortunately, our host can't afford a dedicated server, and I don't want to switch hosts because Ashley.S. and the gang have done so much for me already, and I'm more than comfortable with them, so I've learned to live with what we got. They do server reboots every now and again, so that does help somewhat. It is annoying, but when your host can't afford a dedicated server, and you can't afford to switch hosts, there's not much else you can do, really. It does annoy me greatly when I'm on other peoples' forums and those load ungodly slow though, but like I said, sometimes it can't be helped no matter what you do.

Aw man that sucks. If you don't mind sharing what host you're on? Also, maybe suggest to your host do a server clean up where they purge inactive accounts. That helps out the host a lot and may speed things up.

They do (or they used to, anyway) do a deal like most hosts do where they send out reminders to people who have deadweight hosting accounts (accounts not being used) and that if they don't get back and up and running again, there's a time frame for how long they have until their site gets deleted from the database. Aside from that PH is actually a fairly decent host overall.

 

[Fait]

Speed isa importante slow forums gets me angry which reminds me that i beso doing database maintenace to help the forums load time been getting a few error pages

 

[el canadiano]

I know my tech-administrator and I were getting quite fed up with our slow loading times at Chatting Time, so yes, a decent loading speed is crucial no matter what sort of forum you're running. Unfortunately, our host can't afford a dedicated server, and I don't want to switch hosts because Ashley.S. and the gang have done so much for me already, and I'm more than comfortable with them, so I've learned to live with what we got. They do server reboots every now and again, so that does help somewhat. It is annoying, but when your host can't afford a dedicated server, and you can't afford to switch hosts, there's not much else you can do, really. It does annoy me greatly when I'm on other peoples' forums and those load ungodly slow though, but like I said, sometimes it can't be helped no matter what you do.

I looked at your site, and you should gzip your stuff and cache your images. To do that, put this in your .htaccess (anyone can take this code, by the way).

# compress text, html, javascript, css, xml:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

# Or, compress certain file types by extension:
<Files *.html>
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</Files>

# 1 YEAR
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400, public"
</FilesMatch>
# 1 WEEK
<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
</FilesMatch>
# 2 DAYS 172800
<FilesMatch "\.(xml|txt|css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, proxy-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>
# 1 MIN
<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=60, private, proxy-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Expires "Thu, 15 Dec 2011 20:00:00 GMT"
</FilesMatch>

I do look at Google PageSpeed as well. You can learn some good stuff there.

 

[tbofram]

I think most people give up on a site after a few seconds so yes it does

 

[Joshua Farrell]

Speed is very important. For the Ezine I run, if it isn't going fast, I won't have a good amount of visitors to the site, and the ads would be less likely to be clicked on to get money from them.

 

[Fait]

Mainly a new vistor would think the servers closed down

 

[Fergal]

As many others have already said, speed is very important to members and visitors to a forum. It is also important to search engines and Google have been stressing this recently, they take the speed of your site into account when ranking it in the search engine results. Google's focus on speed has lead to the release of Google Instant;

From a recent Google blog post;

At Google we're obsessed with speed. We've seen time and time again how an increase in apparent speed leads to a direct increase in user happiness and engagement