Disparity between load times of a single site between myself and a client

Question

I have a client who says that their website loads very slowly, but I cannot reproduce this behavior. I have run a couple of site speed tests and the site scores relatively well. My client has tried loading other sites of a similar footprint; all of which load fine.

My client's Internet connection is not great, but if this was just a problem with his Internet connection speed I would expect all sites to run slowly on his machine.

The site in question is running on a Windows Server shared hosting environment.

My inclination is that this is a problem with the server. It is just strange that my client gets such poor results when I do not.

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More details:

host: arvixe
personal class asp pro
MSSQL 2008 Database
Umbraco CMS

Answer 1

The best way is to do the tests from the client site. Can you travel there or remote in? If not, just instruct them how to do the tests.

Browser plugins such as firebug or the chrome inspector tools will show you timing for each of the site components - this data is invaluable.

Answer 2

We run into this periodically. Over time, we've found that the only way to handle this type of situation is to put a third party monitoring tool like Wormly (or one of a hundred million others) on the site and let it run.

When your client complains, take a look at the graph. If it's legit, then you'll see a raised response time.

Over time we've managed to get our clients to check out the graphs themselves because they've come to trust it and they can see for themselves that whatever they're experience is or is not what the rest of the world sees.

There are so many vagaries in Internet traffic that without a reliable third party reporting tool, you end up in repeated and non-productive "works me for/doesn't work for me" conversations.