How to Speed Up Load Time in DNN and Improve Performance

Introduction

Speeding up the load time of your DotNetNuke website will vastly impact your bottom line. In fact, Amazon found that a 0.1 second slower site resulted in 1% loss in revenue. Additionally, Mozilla shaved 2.2 seconds off their landing page load time and had 15.4% more download conversions. Shopzilla shaved about 5 seconds off their load time and saw 25% more page views, 7-12% more revenue, and used 50% less hardware. Beginning to see a pattern here? Internet users these days expect instantaneous results. Not only will customers stay on your website if it loads quickly; but lightning-fast load times and bounce rates will also positively impact your SEO rankings. It is well worth it, then, to carefully consider your default DotNetNuke installation and make a few core changes. First, we'll take a look at contributing factors to DNN load time and then we'll show you some simple changes you can make in the next few minutes that can have a big impact on your site speed.

Factors that Impact Load Time in DotNetNuke

Several components of your website will increase or decrease its baseline performance, depending on how you adjust them. In brief, this includes:

• Website Setup
• Frequency of website updates
• Bandwidth Usage
• Embedded Media Size
• Page Traffic
• Hosting Environment

If you need an extra boost, you can also use a compression or caching module and regularly purge your event log.

Choosing the Right DotNetNuke Skin for Fast Load Time

Before you select the right skin, here’s one quick tip: under your Host --> Host Setting Changes --> Appearance tab, uncheck the “Show copyright credits” box. Generally, CSS-based skin layouts are safe bets, with menu components like Telerik and CSS NavMenu (Telerik was removed from the DNN Platform as of version 9.11). Sometimes the skin is what can make the difference in your website’s load time. If you opt for custom skin, make sure to choose a web designer who adheres to best practices.

Other DotNetNuke Performance Settings to Speed Up Load Time

There are a number of other Performance Settings you can play with if you’re hoping to speed up your DNN website load time. All of the following can be found under the Performance Settings tab:

• Authentication Settings: Uncheck “Enabled” for providers that won’t be used in your website’s portal
• Other Settings: Change the Scheduler Mode to “Timer” and disable the “Auto-Sync File System” Option
• Host --> Scheduler Changes: Change the SearchEngineScheduler to run less frequently (about once every 12-24 hours)

Still confused? Contact Clarity for help!