The Back(end) Story
This week I hope you notice something different about this blog. I r-e-a-l-l-y hope that you notice an increase in response time when visiting the Squarespace Plugins website. For the past month (and really longer than that to be honest), we have had quite a bit of down time along with super slow response and load times. You may or may not be aware that this little ‘ol blog runs on WordPress right now. (do I hear gasps coming across the internets?!) I know, the hypocrisy, right?! The thing is, for over a year this site was simply a test install on a server while teaching homeschool students about Squarespace and WordPress. It didn’t even have a domain! Then, about six months ago I bought the Squarespace Plugins domain in response to all the-
“but WordPress has all these cool plugins, why doesn’t Squarespace?”
nonsense. What started as a jab to friends, family, and students, has now become a real website. And until I can make time to move it to Squarespace (looking like June or July right now), making it all legit, I’m stuck spending unreal amounts of time on backend yuckyness like hosting.
WordPress Hosting Test
As you can see from the image below, there are some huge discrepancies between the old and new host.
Old host vs New Host Response Times
Squarespace Hosting Testing
But wait, this blog is supposed to be about Squarespace? Well to give you a point of reference, here are the response times on my Squarespace website:
Do you see that? Less than a second!! Wow! This could be the difference between a new customer, reader, or subscriber and losing out because your website takes too long to establish a connection. This just makes me even more motivated to get this site on over to where it belongs 
I should note, that this doesn’t pertain to load time of a webpage. That’s a whole different ball of wax. And I’m as guilty as the next when it comes to wanting to include all sorts of bells and whistle to my sites. Fortunately the clean Squarespace coding and fast redundant grid hosting gives us more “time” to play vs any other type of hosting…at least the affordable kind.
Free Tools
If you would like to test your own website, give these free tools a try:
- Host Tracker http://www.host-tracker.com
- Pingdom http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
- IntoDNS http://www.intodns.com/
