Since much of the reason we were able to afford this brand spanking new website is because of community support, business sponsorship and generous fundraising, I’d like to keep everyone in the loop about what is going on with our big baby!
You might have noticed after we launched that the website was running slowly. Thanks for your patience while we sorted out this issue!
Problem solved: With the help of CommandC, we migrated the website to a new and super fast server. There was a significant cost ($655!) to complete this. If you love the website and want to chip in, please make a donation to our new website fund. Any amount (even $1) helps.
In order to figure out why the website was at a snail’s pace, a significant time was spent testing it. If you want to geek out for a minute (this is super valuable to anyone who has a website or blog), here is what the web geniuses explained:
Problem 1: Slow Host
We were using Dreamhost and ultimately their servers couldn’t support the new sophisticated functionality and higher web traffic of our website.
Problem 2: Widgets
While widgets are really cool, they slow down your website, because the widgets themselves are being hosted on a different server. So you can have the fastest website in the world and it gets crippled because it depends on the speed of those servers. Ex. Twitter & Facebook feeds. Now that we migrated the website, we can begin to test to see if we can reintroduce those feeds.
WTF is a widget? It’s all those little things on the right hand side of the website.
Problem 3: High traffic
This is a great thing but can also be a problem, especially if your host cannot handle lots of people looking at the website at the same time. We aren’t complaining!
Problem 4: Photos
We are image happy on Greenpointers.com and images are big which can reduce the speed with which the website loads. It’s all about optimizing images for web, under 50K and NO MORE HOTLINKING. Hotlinking is when you take image code or a direct link from google or flickr instead of uploading a new image onto the website. Again, like with the widgets the website speed becomes dependent upon the speed of the server that hosts that image.
I hope this information is useful to everyone. Thanks for your patience and support!