The images load on your site pretty slow for me on a fast connection. If this is systemic you can seriously influence the bounce rate by upgrading your bandwidth or using cdn's. I don't have the study in front of me but I recall reading the average amount of time a person will wait for a page to load before hitting the back button incredibly short. Think about offloading that to s3 or a cdn.
What is it running? You should consider nginx for the static stuff if you are not already using it. It really is fast and low memory usage on a small server such as that.
Edit:
Looking at your source here are two suggestions:
The load time is getting hurt by the 75 requests for small images in the success area. You should consider an ajax approach that lazy loads those images and doesn't request a ton of images. If that is too much just pick 5-10 randomly and serve just those on each page load. No one is going to wait through the 75 success stories without clicking on the link.
Also, you should minify the javascript and css to cut down on requests and request size.
Comments
The images load on your site pretty slow for me on a fast connection. If this is systemic you can seriously influence the bounce rate by upgrading your bandwidth or using cdn's. I don't have the study in front of me but I recall reading the average amount of time a person will wait for a page to load before hitting the back button incredibly short. Think about offloading that to s3 or a cdn.
this is useful - thanks. we're using a tiny 256 meg instance for our static files (images, etc).
What is it running? You should consider nginx for the static stuff if you are not already using it. It really is fast and low memory usage on a small server such as that.
Edit: Looking at your source here are two suggestions:
The load time is getting hurt by the 75 requests for small images in the success area. You should consider an ajax approach that lazy loads those images and doesn't request a ton of images. If that is too much just pick 5-10 randomly and serve just those on each page load. No one is going to wait through the 75 success stories without clicking on the link.
Also, you should minify the javascript and css to cut down on requests and request size.