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Tagged: Change SEO plugin
- This topic has 26 replies, 5 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 2 months ago by Suzanneper.
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January 2, 2013 at 12:26 am #8900SuzanneperMember
Thanks, Bill, for your detailed explanation - it was very enlightening. Last month I had almost 50,000 views. What would the cost be for that traffic?
January 2, 2013 at 9:35 am #8943Bill MurrayMember$20/mo.
A few words to clarify: my original metrics were in terms of total visitors (but not unique visitors!); yours was in terms of pageviews. Those are 2 different things. As a good rule of thumb, you can at least divide your pageviews by 2 to get an approximation of human visitors, but there are a lot of exceptions. If you use a service like Google Analytics, your pageview count does not include bots, and depending on your site characteristics, bots can be a small or huge share of visitors. You would need to look at your server to get total pageviews from humans and bots. For example, with IDX tools for real estate agents able to create and update automatically thousands of posts that spiders love to crawl, a RE agent site might have 10k monthly human visitors but 50k monthly visitors from bots. Bing is an exceptionally aggressive crawler, and new global crawlers crop up all the time. Unless you look at your server access logs, you are unaware of the visits from bots & content scrapers that are visiting your site, including scrapers that are stealing your content. Those bad visitors are hurting you 2 ways: stealing your content and taking your server resources. For us, these bad visitors have ranged between 10-20% of traffic and are right now running at about 13%. We use tools to block that bad traffic which you in all likelihood aren't blocking now, so all other things being equal, your site on BH has more load with fewer resources than the same site on our network.
As a guide to understanding how traffic impacts a server, no metric (visitors or pageviews or something else) is perfect, because what really matters is whether that traffic is getting a cached page (since serving a cached page takes very little resources), and those metrics don't measure that.
Web: https://wpperform.com or Twitter: @wpperform
We do managed WordPress hosting.
January 2, 2013 at 9:47 am #8944Chris CreeParticipantThere's a ton of great info in this thread and I confess I didn't read it all. But I wanted to chime in and share some additional resources that can help.
Here is an excellent tool for minimizing the size of theme element png images: http://tinypng.org/
If you don't want to worry about resizing the original images for posts, here is a plugin that can automate that process for you: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/imsanity/ Just adjust the settings to match your theme.
When I need to have a big background image I'll us a jpg image because I can save it in Photoshop with a very low image quality. I basically use trial and error reducing the quality setting as much as I can so it still doesn't look bad to the eye. Since theme background images are usually patterns you can usually get away with a much lower image quality so you can have a much smaller file size to help your site load faster.
January 2, 2013 at 12:17 pm #8979Bill MurrayMemberGood points, Chris.
There's another plugin that's worth mentioning: WP Smush.It. Unfortunately, Smush.it depends on a Yahoo service that sometimes isn't available, but when it works it's another way to reduce image sizes for images in your WP media library.
For your comment on background images, try using CSS repeat functionality to create a small portion of your background and repeat it. It can make a big difference in image size. And if you really want to minimize HTTP requests, put your CSS images in a sprite.
Web: https://wpperform.com or Twitter: @wpperform
We do managed WordPress hosting.
January 12, 2013 at 1:15 pm #11483SuzanneperMemberBill, sorry it has taken this long to get back to you. I returned to work after a nice two-week break when I concentrated on my blog and time is short again. Just to clarify, the almost 50,000 views were the stats from WordPress Jetpack and they were actual visits not page views. I have since checked Google Anatytics and the visits are 41,000+ with the unique visitors at 39,000+ and 49,000+ page views for December.
I have had a look at my bill from Bluehost and they charge $5.95/month and I guess you get what you pay for. I will stick with them for the moment but as soon as the traffic gets too high for them, I will get back to you. I have bookmarked this thread.
Thanks you so much for all your help. It has been much appreciated.
January 12, 2013 at 4:40 pm #11506Bill MurrayMemberGlad to hear all is well. Your ratio of page views to visitors is probably what is saving you. I would have expected your page views to be higher. You can use that as a signal that you need to find better ways to get visitors to stay and look around once they visit.
You may be lucky in that you are on a less busy server. In my experience, BH bogs down at a much lower traffic level. If you monitor your page load times and see them deteriorate, especially if they get above 2 seconds, you can look around for alternatives.
Good luck.
Web: https://wpperform.com or Twitter: @wpperform
We do managed WordPress hosting.
January 25, 2013 at 4:12 pm #14830SuzanneperMemberBill, I am ready to move. I am so over the slow speed and the down times. It is driving me crazy. Recently I got an email from Brian Gardner at Studiopress with a hosting deal. Is this the same service that have spoken about above?
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