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Hi there, 

 

One of our clients has a Wordpress website. For the campaigns, we implemented Unbounce in order to design and distribute “user-friendly” landing pages. After one week, we noticed almost 0 conversion. But, we have a decent CTR through our ads and consistent copy between our ads and the landing page. 

Then, I test to open the landing pages with a clean browser (flushed out cookies). At this time it was really slow. I asked few colleagues to try from their home, mobile and desktop, all reporting slow loading. So, I used lighthouse and GTMetrix. I precise that the page is optimized and weights around 0.3 MB. 

I see we have a TTFB (Time To First Byte) that varies between 2.2 seconds to 10 seconds (source: GTMetrix), and I have a speed index that goes from 2.4 seconds up to 10 seconds (most of the time above 8 seconds; source: Lighthouse). 

My question is: where does this poor performance comes from?

  • Our hosting provider? But I thought the landing pages were hosted by Unbounce
  • The Wordpress implementation? But we used the Unbounce official Wordpress plugin

Would love to get your thoughts on it. 

Thanks for your help

Hi @Quentin_H. Thanks for your detailed question. Our team looked into this and had the following to share:

It looks like you are using a WP domain with our WP plugin. Looking at the available information and screenshots you provided, the slow loading time is very likely a WP related issue.

Here is an image showing how our WP plugin works. As you can see in the high-level diagram, our plugin works between the Unbounce servers and their WIP server — it essentially acts as a proxy.

 


On the Unbounce side, our servers are very fast and optimized for page serving. However, as the request is first routed through their WP server before it arrives at our servers. This means that we rely on the WP server, so if their server is slow then the page load time will be slow.

In cases like this, the best suggestion would be to either switch to a CNAME connected domain (as this completely bypasses the WP server) or to somehow speed up the WP server (which might not be possible, and unfortunately, not something we have any control over).

Another suggestion would be to limit the large content files you have on your page (i.e. videos, images) as they will slow down page load times slightly as well. However, looking at the screenshots you provided, this option probably won’t have much of an impact — the slowness seems to be coming from the WP side.

If you would like us to take a deeper look, feel free to share your domain/page. Hope this helps! 

Hello Amanda,

You confirmed my intuition :) 

We decided to purchase another domain hosted in Western Europe and running Unbounce with CNAME integration 🙂 Nevertheless, I still see the Domain as “Configuring...” while it’s been more than 24 hours we set everything right. 

Would you have a look?

Our team would be happy to take a look — can you please share the domain name with us? CNAME propagation can take up to a few days but not in most cases, so we can take a look to make sure everything looks alright with the configurations just to be safe. 

Feel free to also create a new support ticket to troubleshoot this 1:1 with a team member if that works best for you, by emailing support@unbounce.com.

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