Parked Pages Differ in Load Time
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008
Load times for parked domain names differ greatly.
Most visitors to parked domain names hit the back button on their browser rather than clicking on a link. One way to ensure that visitors click the back button more often is to have parked pages that load very slowly. How many times have you visited a web site and clicked back because it took forever to load?
I tested out the domain parking companies today to see how fast their parked pages load. I used a free tool at Pingdom to calculate load times for three different landing pages at 7 parking companies. I threw out the longest and shortest loading page for each service and have reported the middle one below.
Before viewing the load times, a caveat. Actually, many:
1. Some pages appear to have loaded to the end user even though additional items are still loading (such as stats trackers). So even if a page takes a few seconds to load, the end user may have seen it load in less than a second.
2. Network traffic and proximity to Pingdom’s test servers may matter. In other words, there are a lot of variables outside the parking company’s control.
3. Almost all of the companies loaded very quickly. Just because a parked page took longer to load than a competitor doesn’t mean it’s materially different.
4. Parking companies offer multiple landers, some of which load faster than others. I didn’t test all landers.
There are several ways companies can make their parked pages load faster. Good coding, compressed images, and proper CSS usage matter. Here are some other factors.
With that in mind (and I know people will bring up other fallacies in the testing methodology), here’s how the services performed:
Sedo – 1.1 seconds. Sedo has fairly straightforward designs that are light on graphics. They have lots of text with their one-click landers but the absence of large graphics keeps load time down.
Parked.com – 1.9 seconds. I assumed Parked would be slower given its large graphic on each landing page, but they’ve done a good job compressing the graphics.
DomainSponsor – 1.9 seconds. DomainSponsor’s landers are “googleesque” without pictures.
WhyPark – 1.9 seconds. WhyPark is coming out with a new version that should load even faster. But nothing to complain about here.
TrafficZ – 3.0 seconds. TrafficZ’s landers have multiple graphic files. One of the landers I ran had a file size of 136.4kb.
Dotzup – 3.0 seconds. Some of the landers are heavy on graphics.
EvoLanding – 5.8 seconds. This didn’t surprise me. EvoLanding’s pages take a long time to load, likely because the system auto-generates pages from multiple sources on the fly.
Related posts:
- GoDaddy Tests Parking Pages on 404 Pages
- Uploading Graphics to Parked.com Pages
- Tips for Domain Landing Pages – from NameMedia Research
Tags: Domain Parking, domainsponsor, dotzup, evolanding, parked, sedo, trafficz, whypark
How did Fabulous.com compare?
and what’s about Namedrive? Did You test too? Thx
Great topic.
You should test Domain Embarking and maybe aeiou too. (I can give you examples if needed via email.)
I am not surprised by evolanding. I really like what they are doing but the load times will probably make half the visitors hit the back button in less than 5.8 seconds so that is something they need to work on there.
It’s all about getting visitors to look at the page, like then be drawn to click on something so graphics, relevant text and/or ads and load times are all factors.
We are all competing with the Back button. That is a domainers worst enemy.
It well also known that with retail sites that:
speed = more money earned
A better experience leaves surfers in a better buying mood.
re NameDrive and Fabulous – don’t have domains there, so someone else can test and post results here.
Namedrive – 2.9 seconds
parking is a waste of time and resources.
Lizzy,
What do you suggest?
Lizzy suggests that we hover. She flies a helicopter.
develop and then advertise my suggestion
Andrew,
It should be noted that pingdom.com is hoated in the EU and so is sedo, so that’s why sedo showed the fasted load times!
- Richard
Er, ‘hosted’. haha
I would also recommend to use this online free performance testing tool – http://Site-Perf.com/
It measure loading speed of page and it’s requisites (images/js/css) like browsers do and shows nice detailed chart – so you can easily spot bottlenecks. It’s very detailed and accurate, supports a lot of features like Keep-Alive and HTTP-compression.
Also useful feature is that this tool can measure quality of internet link of your server.