Check Your Webhost Speed
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008Rate My Webhosting is a handy online app from Hostgator. Just by adding a snippet of javascript to you enable your sites visitors to rate the load speed of your page on a sliding scale (1-5 stars). Hostgator provide you with a secret link to a Google maps mashup with your visitors locations overlaid, and a breakdown of how they rate you. This should be a useful tool to run on any site that is geotargeting ~ if you are located in Europe paying for North American adwords traffic and have a host in Asia it is good to know how well your site is responding. Sites that are slow to load lose traffic, and a lot depends on the location and quality of your host.
You can see my secret link here (I’m not too worried about showing the stats on this blog, although I wouldn’t recommend this for anyone working in a competitive niche).
I liked this little app so much that I wrote a Wordpress plugin for it. Wordpress can be a pain when it comes to adding javascript snippets, so hopefully this will make it quick and easy to add Hostgator’s tool to your site. If you want a copy of the Wordpress plugin please contact me and I will make it available to you.
Don’t forget to rate my webhosting whilst you’re here!