Website Critique

[PC Doctor]

I have recently finished rebuilding our website and would be interested in your thoughts and critique on what you do and don't like.

www.northwestpcdoctors.co.uk

Regards

Paul

 

[Markverhyden]

Where is this being hosted? Takes 4-5 seconds to fully load the landing page. And hyper links also take a long time.

 

[PC Doctor]

I have a reseller account with https://www.vidahost.com/

I have spoken to them on a number of occasions about load speed as I think it is affecting conversions however they maintain that the problem is with the wordpress installation / theme.

I have worked on optimising all images etc to decrease load time but it is always around that 4-5 second time.

 

[Markverhyden]

I know nothing about wordpress so can't help with that. Have you tried putting the site on your own computer and seeing what happens? In the past I have seen where large pictures make things slow. But they were multiple pictures in the mb size. You shop-images.jpg on the landing page is only 127kb.

Not sure if you tried this. If it were me. And I had a low traffic site. I'd take the site offline and drop in a few default themes to see what happens.

 

[tf76]

Have you got a cache plugin installed?

https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/

 

[Megaarch]

Maybe in the process, but customer portal page has no link.

 

[PC Doctor]

We were using the cache speed from word fence however have just replaced with supercache.

Is the load speed any better

 

[Markverhyden]

Still slow for me. OS X 10.9.5 and FF 40.0.3

Some random observations

I do know that our use of English does vary but this sounds a bit odd. At the bottom of the landing page.

The PC Doctor are one of The Northwest’s longest established computer repair businesses starting up in 1999 and running constantly until today under the same name

I'd think about something like

The PC Doctor, founded in 1999, is one of The Northwest's longest established computer repair businesses.

When you mention specific towns you might think about adding "and surrounding localities" or something similar.

http://www.northwestpcdoctors.co.uk/laptop-repairs-st-helens/windows-errors-repaired/ - Many Many machines.....

Maybe break up some of those paragraphs with bulleted lists.

I know it's sounding picky but you have an MBP with a BSD.

http://www.northwestpcdoctors.co.uk/tablet-repairs-st-helens/ - Apple iPad Repairs above the Samsung Tablet

You have prices listed in the console repair section. But do not seem to have much in the way of pricing listed in other areas. I think many EU like to see some type of price list for everything.

 

[frostbyte5014]

I have spent years testing hosting services to see who provides the best Wordpress hosting. I have even built my own servers and used them for years till I started having trouble maintaining them. I now have everything hosted on A2hosting.com and have been using them for over a year. I have not looked back since. They provide dedicated hosting speed for shared hosting prices. They beat the competition hands down. I don't care who you host with, do yourself a favor and give them a try. I guarantee you won't be disappointed. Also their tech support is fast, friendly and knowledgeable.

 

[PC Doctor]

MBP BSD ?

Still slow for me. OS X 10.9.5 and FF 40.0.3

Some random observations

I do know that our use of English does vary but this sounds a bit odd. At the bottom of the landing page.


I'd think about something like


When you mention specific towns you might think about adding "and surrounding localities" or something similar.

http://www.northwestpcdoctors.co.uk/laptop-repairs-st-helens/windows-errors-repaired/ - Many Many machines.....

Maybe break up some of those paragraphs with bulleted lists.

I know it's sounding picky but you have an MBP with a BSD.

http://www.northwestpcdoctors.co.uk/tablet-repairs-st-helens/ - Apple iPad Repairs above the Samsung Tablet

You have prices listed in the console repair section. But do not seem to have much in the way of pricing listed in other areas. I think many EU like to see some type of price list for everything.

Thanks for taking the time to have a good look around the website, speed wise it appears a change of host is probably going to be the answer but that's something I am going to have to review and consider. The reason I have quoted prices on the Tablet and Console repairs and not the others as most competitors advertise fixed prices for those, fixed price repairs on Laptops and PC's are a lot more difficult to offer.

Going to make the changes that you pointed out shortly.

 

[PC Doctor]

I have spent years testing hosting services to see who provides the best Wordpress hosting. I have even built my own servers and used them for years till I started having trouble maintaining them. I now have everything hosted on A2hosting.com and have been using them for over a year. I have not looked back since. They provide dedicated hosting speed for shared hosting prices. They beat the competition hands down. I don't care who you host with, do yourself a favor and give them a try. I guarantee you won't be disappointed. Also their tech support is fast, friendly and knowledgeable.

Will take a look at them, the current host has been trying to speed it up which makes me think it may be a wordpress / theme fault rather than the host itself. Going to have a think and see how I can resolve.

 

[fencepost]

This is a little bit old, but I'm going to recommend focusing on hosting within the UK rather than looking for the best WordPress hosting. The speed of the hosting will matter, but if you pick someplace in California to host it you're starting out with a page load handicap.

 

[mrapoc]

TSOHOST are uk based and support is flipping fantastic. Good prices too.

I have boosted my site a bit using a CDN but that's mainly for the large images and for google speed ranking.

http://my.tsohost.com/aff.php?aff=3188

and have a coupon for 10% off FRESH10OFF

(FYI it's an affiliate link but all the same I do recommend them to everyone now - they even transfer your site free of charge - i've had support at 3am too when I've cocked something up. Also asked them to move database server and investigate slow imports - after all that it was due to a plugin)

 

[mrapoc]

Oh and heres a site hosted without a CDN. http://www.paintedlife.co.uk/

 

[Y.F.N.C.G.]

According to http://www.webpagetest.org/ you could do better with image compression...right now it's giving you a D grade for that. One issue I see is the images rendered on the page are not native size...some of the images are being down-sized in the browser which can cause slowness.

Also it mentions keep-alive not being enabled....which I believe is a host issue.

Finally, the RepairShopr form may be causing some of the delay as well. You might consider moving that off your homepage and just linking to it from the home page.

As far as the site itself...I like it! You homepage has all the necessary info which is great and I love how you've customized the mobile view with streamlined content and contact buttons!

I would suggest only a couple things:

1. Make your phone number bigger. Consider moving your logo over to the left and putting your phone number to the right....I think people may miss it up there at the top in small font.

2. Consider adding your customer reviews to the home page, right now they're buried under the Contact Us menu and those can go a long way in getting a new client to trust you.

Otherwise, great stuff!

 

[MrBojangles]

Just want to say one thing. When I scroll up and down your menu resizes in an annoying way, moving the screen. I was trying to read the headlines of some text and everytime I scrolled to the right area the screen moves. That kind of irritated me.

 

[PC Doctor]

It has taken some time and I have now completed the changes I think have sped the load time up, I was hosting with a UK host called vidahost who are a sister company as it happens to TSO hosts, only found out when I gave them the links to look at for transferring the sites and they were already on TSO's servers.

Word fence was causing a lot of the load time problems, now running supercache and we also upgraded to a newer version of PHP before transferring the database to a newer server running an SSD.

Please tell me the load time is better.

The home page is as far as I think complete unless you guys can come up with additions. The internal pages are now going to go through a complete overhall over the next few days.

http://www.northwestpcdoctors.co.uk/

 

[Markverhyden]

Sorry. Load time is still bad. I did not make note earlier. This time I used webpagetest.org and it's still really slow. I also loaded the url into Chrome and it took some 7 seconds.

 

[PC Doctor]

Thanks, I think I have resolved further issues now and hopefully it is much quicker loading the home page.

I still have a lot of work to do on the internal pages however

 

[NerdyBuddy]

Loads fairly fast for me. Ran it on Pingdom and it was at a 5.8s load speed.