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General Discussion - Speed of searching

Andy Hadley

Andy Hadley

Posted on 26 April 2015

Quote
We're on a hosted service. There's a report someone has done to management which details that the system is slow on searching - (between 8 and 20 seconds depending on the time of day and volume of users). My response is that it is not Google, but what can be done to speed that up ? It is and always has been a serious usability problem, along with the reliance on editors entering metadata in the right places.

James Delaney

AdminJames Delaney

Posted on 28 April 2015

Hi Andy,

Are you using custom metadata? This will have an impact on search speed as does our older site search facility. Our newer "indexed search" is an improvement on our older search facility too. You can tell easily if you're using it as your search results page will be more like the one on this site. The older search function presented search results in a table.

We have highlighted ways we can improve the Sitekit CMS indexed search facility further and it is an active area of CMS development for us.

In the meantime, though not specifically directed at search results, there are several things that can be done to improve overall site performance. YSlow provide details on 34 different points of which 23 are easy enough to test/improve: 

  1. Minimize HTTP Requests
  2. Use a Content Delivery Network
  3. Avoid empty src or href
  4. Add an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
  5. Gzip Components
  6. Put StyleSheets at the Top
  7. Put Scripts at the Bottom
  8. Avoid CSS Expressions
  9. Make JavaScript and CSS External
  10. Reduce DNS Lookups
  11. Minify JavaScript and CSS
  12. Avoid Redirects
  13. Remove Duplicate Scripts
  14. Configure ETags
  15. Make AJAX Cacheable
  16. Use GET for AJAX Requests
  17. Reduce the Number of DOM Elements
  18. No 404s
  19. Reduce Cookie Size
  20. Use Cookie-Free Domains for Components
  21. Avoid Filters
  22. Do Not Scale Images in HTML
  23. Make favicon.ico Small and Cacheable

You can read about each of them on the YSlow website.

Also, take a look at our own datasheets: 

I hope this helps you slim down the request/results timings.