How to increase revenue, free tip from a pro!
 

I'm still pretty new here but I thought I would offer up some free advice for the benefit of everyone here at GFY...

My first entry into the adult space is a review site and I've had a chance now to check out over 500 sites and there's a recurring theme I've noticed across the vast majority of sites and that's long page load times.

Page load times directly affect your revenue, far more than you probably expect... I currently work for one of the largest dating sites in the world and we've noticed that even 100ms increase in page load times will drastically affect conversions...

I'm not talking a matter of seconds, I'm talking a matter of 100ms. This is further verified by Amazon who did some A/B testing (as well as Google). Let's take a look at the results:

500ms = 20% loss = USD$ 2.967 Billion loss
100ms = 4% loss = USD$ 593,400,000
1ms = 0.04% loss = USD$ 5,934,000

That's a lot of cash... while the additional servers / co location facilities / CDN is going to cost you extra cash every month, it could make quite a difference in your revenue. It's well worth the time spent to calculate how much you could be gaining and looking into how you can better optimize your server performance for the sites you're currently running.

Those VPSs I see people running are going to kill you in the long run and there are always some relatively inexpensive ways to increase your site performance. Here's a few recommendations:

- Use memcached or another memory caching system
- Look into xcache or similar systems that precompile scripting languages for faster delivery
- Abandon Apache in lieu of some faster more optimized systems like Nginx running fast cgi PHP
- Have someone _very_ skilled in database performance tweak your indexing and memory allocations, look at normalizing data, and generally restructure for performance
- If you're a smaller site, look at adding just one more box specifically if you're combining your web server and database server on the same box
- PRE-gzip / minify your css and js files every deployment (configure your server appropriately)
- If you're a larger network, do you host at only one data center? Do you use a CDN?
- Check the I/O of your drives, does it ever peak?

There's a few to get you started... start tweaking now and get better conversion rates, longer customer retention, and of course... $$$profit$$$

Why did I post this? Because I'm sending you guys traffic and I'd love for everyone to convert a little better :D If you're a larger network and your devs don't have the experience to make this happen then give me a shout. I can work directly with your developers to help decrease your page load times (for a consulting fee of course). My specific area of expertise is PHP and MySQL.

Good luck!

Nice essay. Thanks for writing.

I know that personally I will not wait for a page longer than a few seconds loading, unless I really really needed to get in.

You should blog and get rich ;)

nice tip man, thanks for sharing

good read

Nice reading..

http://designfuck.com/moar.jpg

thanks for sharing

Actually.. this IS a nice post.

good info thanks

Very useful tip to consider while making websites. Thanks!

great info :thumbsup

Useful well written information on GFY?

You are messing with the balance of nature BestXXXPorn!

Thanks for the post :thumbsup

Glad you guys like it! I'll definitely be posting more similar posts in the future :D

I think we're safe with 10 gigbit servers and 600 plus machines powering our sites :thumbsup:thumbsup

All in-house :winkwink:

Pretty much says it all..

damn that's a lot of grunt right there :thumbsup

Bump for this excellent post!!!!

Bump for the Sunday crew...

Wow man thanks a lot for sharing! I never would have dreamed 100ms made such a difference.

Thanks again! :thumbsup

Good stuff here for sure, moloi`eheme :thumbsup

Yep, surfers are always in a hurry, don't forget that!

That's really sweet, but doesn't help you anything if your bandwidth providers have shitty (or overloaded) interconnect agreements :2 cents:

It's like taking a Ferrari engine and put it into a Fiat then take the Fiat engine and put it into the Ferrari, and expect the Ferrari to outrun the Fiat :winkwink:

Good post. I didn't know that.

Learned something today at GFY. Who'd a thunk it?

Good post and very true.
Tweaking servers and databases can work miracles and save money (or make more).

someone should tell that to myspace as facebook is fast becoming the main social network

One of my sites which gets hit by Googlebot 100,000+ times a day is currently chugging along off a 384/8000kbps DSL link (in AUSTRALIA!) while I fix a fault with the USA server. :( International hops + overloaded link = slllooowww. It's not ideal, but it's better than being 100% down

Facebook flew by MySpace a while back :P

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?&w=40...u=myspace.com&

Very good indeed :thumbsup

Great post. I totally agree with this as I will dump a site if it does not load. Who joins a paysite if they can't get the tour to load?

Thank you for sharing info

This serious business thread could use a bump here and there.

If your site has mainly static content and you're looking for a bit of a performance boost to tide you over until the next hardware upgrade/software rewrite, consider Varnish ( http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/ ). It's far more lightweight and efficient than something like Squid configured in reverse proxy mode. Just remember that Varnish won't work very well (or at all) if you don't send an Expires: header, or you set cookies.

sounds like bullshit

1/100 of a second won't make any difference

i only close a site if it's not loading for like 10 seconds

good point, but no one would even notice anything less than a few seconds

Great tips .. Thanks for sharing :)

That's a pretty ignorant statement considering it's been backed up by my own company's findings and Google and Amazon and a variety of other large businesses... do some searches yourself.

Good post indeed. There's always room for optimization. (increasing revenue without having to increase traffic is never frowned upon) :thumbsup

Use your head. Who cares if a site loads 1/100 second slower? You can't even notice it.

You could get 10000X better results just by tweaking the design.

Very technical, but good info! Thanks for the post!

Bump for the afternoon crowd...

I'm not a techy guy but we have some big sites that need the best.

I cant go into details but...

Lets just say we have it :thumbsup:thumbsup

Ummm that is what data is all about. Lets say 50% of the people will wait 2 seconds for a total load. 50% won't so 2.01 seconds has different data. He is not saying you are saving 20% of sales this is a fractional increase but if you have 10k a day coming in the front door and you convert 1/500. You only need to save .01 to make about $200/month. More then pays for the extra server.

One last bump ;)

500ms = 20% loss

That's like saying you'll lose half your traffic after 1 1/2 seconds, not true.
Count 1 1/2 seconds its nothing. You're out by a factor of about 5 at a guess.