Is The Site Faster?

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As many of you have told us, the speed of the TPM website has been an issue of late. So we spent some time auditing the different components of the site to improve performance. And over the last week we’ve been able to cut download times by just over 30%. We think we can cut it even more. And we’re working on doing that.

Most of the boost will be felt by non-Prime members. But Prime members should see improvement too.

As you’d expect, there is an unavoidable trade off between site performance – by which we generally mean how fast and clean the page loads when you visit – and the things we need to do to fund the site. But we’ve been able to improve things pretty dramatically. And even though we went into the project thinking we’d have to take some hit on the revenue side, we’ve actually – at least so far – managed to find efficiencies and strategies that have allowed us to hold our own or possibly even add marginally to revenues while improving performance.

Also important is that site speed varies tremendously on the situation at your end of the Internet. In most cases, if you have a newish computer and a fast Internet connection TPM was already reasonably fast. But if your computer is a bit older, if you’re using older software or software configured in a non-standard way and especially if you have a slow internet connection, download times could be pretty rough. Happily, we’ve been able to drive the biggest gains for people in this latter category – people who were having the worst load times.

We’re pretty pleased with these results and we are going to try to drive down load times even more because we want the TPM site to be as positive an experience as we hope reading the stories is. So if you notice the difference please drop us a line – it will make us feel happy. And if you’re not, please let us know too. By doing a little Q&A on what sort of set up you’re using we can hopefully improve your experience and that of others in similar positions.

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