Yesterday I’ve been mostly busy moving the German Max Poker Bonus to a new environment and upgrading the scripts to our latest’s. When Kurt and I started working together and created our first Max Poker Bonus site, we decided to host it on a server located in Austria (instead of Germany) because of a German law that prohibits sites linking to online gaming sites. This law is also the reason that we chose to use a .com, instead of a .de domain. So we found a small, but the reliable host, where the wires are short when you’re in need of assistance. Host Austria that is.
Unfortunately, Host Austria’s infrastructure was a little bit outdated, and because of that many of the scripts I’ve created for the Dutch Max Poker Bonus and UK Max Poker Bonus didn’t work. We could easily have moved to another host, but we decided to stay, as quite frankly we were more than satisfied with their service.
Long story short, yesterday was the big day! Christian from Host Austria copied our site and database to a new server, and I made sure that all scripts got upgraded and verified that everything worked as it should. After changing the DNS overnight, I woke up this morning to find our site running flawlessly. Great!
Today I will finish off the big overhaul.
As many of you already know, Google recently released Site Performance, a tool that you can find under Labs in your Webmaster Tools. This, together with Google’s Page Speed tool and Yahoo’s YSlow tool, both add-ons to Firebug, gives you advice in which areas you can adjust your to improve its performance. Things like enabling Gzip compression or parallelizing downloads can really speed up your site. I’ve done this (and more) for a few of my sites already, and I really recommend doing it if you own a site with a fair amount of traffic. Case studies have proven that a faster loading website drastically improves user experience, thus conversions, and we all know what that means!