Emails to Clients That Turned Into Blog Posts*
An Ongoing Series
Every so often, we respond to an email from one of our website clients that asks a great question or covers a common experience. We’re sharing them here on our site so you can benefit from a little Ogre Knowledge, too!
Have your own great question?
Recently, a client contacted us when, shortly after launching their new site, the boss complained that his otherwise excellent new website seemed to take a really long time to load. After running some tests and checking configurations, we reported that everything was in the green on our end, which left a few likely culprits in the journey between our hosting servers and her boss’s cell phone. Here’s what we told her:
Good afternoon,
Thanks for letting us know! As I’m sure you understand, the experience a user has with a slow website can be caused by many things.
To test our side of the equation, we ran speed tests with several tools, and they all gave glowing reports on the website’s speed. I like PageSpeed Insights from Google: https://pagespeed.web.dev
Other sources of slowdowns that we can’t check or control include issues with the ISP or local network used to access the site; the user’s device, including software, settings, and issues like unapplied updates; and temporary spikes in local, network, server, or even individual webpage traffic. The website also slows down temporarily as updates to the WordPress core, plugins, and theme are performed a few times a month, but these typically only take a few seconds up to a few minutes.
If you get additional complaints, supplying as many of the following details as possible can help us pinpoint what is happening — if the issue is caused by the website and not one of the other factors:
- Date and time of the issue
- Full URL(s) of the page(s) accessed on the website
- User’s device information:
- Make and model of device
- OS and version
- Browser and version
- Screenshots/recordings of the issue as it is happening
We realize it can be difficult to gather this type of information after the fact, but the more you can supply, the better we can help.
Thank you,
The CleverOgre Team
*Edited for spelling and grammar, style and formatting, and to protect personal info; otherwise these are the bona fide truth.
Want to have a team that provides answers like these to your website questions? Drop us a line!