woopra

Recently, some Woopra Members may have noticed the following when logging into Woopra:

Message from Woopra maintenance team:
Servers are down for maintenance, you may want to retry connecting later. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Acknowledge!

This is a good sign. It means Woopra is under construction, and preparing for the next exciting release of Woopra.

The Woopra development team has been working overtime to update Woopra’s infrastructure and servers, as many have noticed. We’re adding notifications and alerts to warn you of server maintenance and other issues as we move towards the release of the next version of Woopra. Some will impact all members, but most will only affect a few users at a time.

As John Pozadzides mentioned in his recent “State of the Union” address for Woopra, Woopra is now seeing more than 50 million page views a day across more than 50,000 sites, gathering over 1,000,000,000 pieces of raw statistical data every day. We’ve increased the hosting architecture by 300%. Jad Younan has developed some fascinating and unique server code to streamline and improve the efficiency and speed of Woopra, which many have reported.

With input and feedback from our 60,000 beta testers on the Woopra Forums, Elie Khoury and the Woopra development team has rewritten the underlying code for the Woopra desktop client and the Woopra Members Area.

Some feature improvements include:

• Improvements in the Menu area interface for easier navigation and access.
• Improvements in the visual indicators for Event Notification and other alerts.
• Ability to disconnect from sites that don’t require consistent monitoring.
• Improvements in the Woopra Live Chat for customizations.
• A new Webmaster Tools tab to track Google and Alexa rankings.
• Live visitor views with mini maps and original referrer links preserved.
• The Woopra API will be released soon opening the door to Woopra Plugins and third party apps.

We are committed to providing the basic version of Woopra for free. We will soon be implementing various paid versions of Woopra for extended features, multiple site coverage, high traffic sites, etc., and will have news on that soon.

We’ll alert you on the blog, which is visible within your Woopra desktop client, and via Woopra Twitter, Woopra Members Twitter, and other social media venues.

We’re making big changes to every part of Woopra, so expect some short downtimes and changes over the next few weeks as we move towards the next release. Keep us informed on how Woopra is working for you, and keep your feedback coming. With your help, Woopra is becoming the hottest live web analytics program on the web.

I will be at WordCamp Denver this weekend, February 28, 2009, so stop by the WordCast Podcast and Woopra table and tell us how you are using Woopra on your site.

In Is Google Analytics Slooowing Down Your Blog? by Easton Ellsworth on the Blog Herald, he asks a very important question:

Do you think Google Analytics is worth the trouble? Why or why not?

The first question we usually get when talking about Woopra is “will it slow down my site.”

Personally, I find this fascinating, as people seem to have no fear of adding WordPress Plugins, Google Gadgets, and JavaScript, AJAX, and all kinds of bells and whistles to their site, but add a statistics package and instantly they ask about load times and impacts on the user experience. Clearly, there is some experiential history here worth exploring.

A quick search for reports on Google Analytics load times across the web and found a long history of people blaming the statistics program for dragging down their site loading times, with a lot of articles disputing those blames.

Many claim the Google Analytics slow down is a myth. SwamiSEO found very little page loading slow down using Google Analytics, and discussions on Stackoverflow also reported there was little difference. The Royal Pingdom report featured on the Blog Herald admitted that while the numbers weren’t significant, they were measurable across the three months of testing.

A quick glance into Google Analytics loading time history and mythology found it used to be slow. Many reports date back to when Google Analytics was using the urchin.js script, which Google replaced with the new ga.js script at the end of 2007. They recommend replacing the slower script with new faster one. AskApache has an article on how to speed up the urchin.js script loading times if you wish to continue with the older version.

The Blog Herald article referenced the slow load times for Google Analytics study by Royal Pingdom on Google Analytics script load times in Europe compared to North America, which were admittedly small, but the responses of the readers in the article comments shows a continued believe that Google Analytics is a resource hog and drag on their system, in spite of research testing reporting otherwise around the world.

There are many ways of testing your own page load times. Truwex Online Web Page Check Tool for Google Analytics checks Google Analytics specifically, and Pingdom Tools and Pagetest are just a few of the many page load time checking services available for free and a fee.

Last year, we did an informal evaluation of loading speeds for Woopra against the competition, and recent updates to servers and code have made Woopra even faster. We’ll be doing more load time studies and testing soon as the new version is released, but the feedback so far continues to be that Woopra puts little if any significant load on your site and users’ experience.

Woopra is seeing more than 50 million page views a day across more than 50,000 sites using our live web analytics program. This means we’re collecting 1,000,000,000 pieces of raw statistical data each day – and Woopra is still in beta testing development! That’s a lot of data streaming across servers, so page loading and speed issues are important to us.