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Old 07-18-2009, 01:55 PM  
BestXXXPorn
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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!
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