music site

critique please UK Music Forum Gigs and Tours

love this forum btw.

Hi Doug,

Congrats on your very active forum! 40 of your members celebrate their birthday today!

Consider removing the entire What's going on box from the view of guests. It may have a value to your members, but consider hiding it from guests. The content of the box is irrelevant to the topic of your site, and the removal of it may speed up the load time of your home page. Also, it would remove over 40 links from your home page; links which are not relevant to the topic.

great thanks marvin, ill do that as page load time is a big issue for us.

what else ?

The following is an example of the code I see on your thread pages:

Code:

<h1>
    Thread: <span class="threadtitle"><a href="/forum/urban-music/1st-blood-damnfiner-242361.html" title="Reload this Page">1st Blood - Damnfiner</a></span>
</h1>

1. Consider removing the link, as it is a link that likely has very little practical value because it points to itself.

2. The title="Reload this Page" should either be removed, or if you wish to keep it then change it to title="1st Blood - Damnfiner".

3. Consider moving the word Thread: outside of the <h1> </h1> tags, so only the actual thread title, 1st Blood - Damnfiner, is within the heading tags. Or, perhaps even better, remove the word Thread: completely.

I personally would like it to be as follows:

Code:

<h1>
    1st Blood - Damnfiner
</h1>

Actually, the above suggestion should be easy to implement with the vBSEO "Relevant Replacement" feature.

Thanks Marvin, I'd definately implicate that.

Any more suggestions ?

Doug, it appears "Keep-Alives" have not been enabled on your server, and for each downloaded file a new connection has to be opened. Open a ticked with your hosting company, and ask them to enable "Keep-Alive" for your website. It will only take them a few minutes, and it should have a noticeable impact on your speed.

Done, Thank again Marvin. I've sent you a PM.

What else ?

After they have enabled the Keep-Alives, do not close the ticket. Ask them to enable GZip compression for the following mime types:

text/text
text/html
text/plain
text/xml
text/css
application/x-javascript
application/javascript

It will reduce the download size of the text files on your site, and it will speed things up.

For example, the current size of the base html file of your home page is around 83,904 bytes. With GZip compression enabled, it will likely be only about 25,000 bytes. GZip compression will reduce the size of not just your base html files, but also all your javascripts and CSS files, too.

*re-opens ticket lol

Before I do, is there any potentially negative side effects with doing this, e.g spider problems etc.

I've just ran my site though Site Load Test - Speed Up The Performance Of Your Web Pages please can you take a look and let me know what you think.

I think my site is really slow and this is a major issue for google

Not at all. Spiders/bots crawl GZipped text files.

Congrats on enabling Keep-Alives. It looks much better now!

here is a link to the report Site Load Speed Report

Let's see how things improve after GZip compression has been enabled.

By the way, I'm testing one of your thread pages ( /urban-music/1st-blood-damnfiner-242361.html ), and the Keep-Alives alone reduced the load time from 12 seconds down to 10 seconds.