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The website speed race between Davos and Aldridges - who wins?


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I have forwarded this comment to the Aldridge web Director for comment.

But i have just logged into both and used the search term "Yale Blanks"

Davenports took 18 seconds for a response which is a big improvement

Aldridges took 9 seconds which is slower than usuall and is constantly being monitored to see how they can improve and make things faster.

Also bear in mind that Aldridges carry much more stock lines than Davenports so the search engine has to work a lot harder.

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Of course, full respect to both distributors as they're the best in the game but I got to say their websites are slow as sh*t and it's not ok.

I'm a web developer with 14 years experience and I've never known such brand-popular sites to suffer from such slow service. It's a strange coincidence that both websites, related to locksmithing equipment are suffering the same way. Almost as if they're hosted by the same providers. I don't know what their providers are and I don't care, a website, any website, shouldn't take 18 seconds to load the main page, let alone perform a search. The ecommerce software they run on will be well designed enough to handle a fair few thousand items without a problem, they're built for this exact purpose after all.

Look at this key cutting section of this forum for instance, there's 107 pages of threads, each page with 50 threads, that's 5,350 threads with 37,000+ posts in total. Add up all the different forum sections and there's an excess of 95 THOUSAND posts. I just timed a forum-wide search for the term "keys" and it gave me 6,086 results, the page was loaded in 1.3 seconds according to my browser developer tools.

Alright, so Davenport and Aldridge have to handle payments, that does not slow their site down as those tasks are performed by a third party service and have zero performance hit on the processes of the main site.

I've ran my own website from my bedroom for 14 years, I run a technical cryptographic service unrelated to locksmithing with an API that gets requested around 100 times per second on a busy day by bots/scripts/machines and sometimes actual users. Each request searches a 8 terabyte custom-made database for a few thousand records in under 15 milliseconds, or 3 milliseconds if cached. If it takes longer than that, I know something's wrong. I could easily host both of their websites on my server at home and it would be lightning fast unless something is catastrophically wrong with their code, and I would fix it. I would not accept to do it because hosting websites that bring in several thousands of pounds a day on my server at home would be an incredible security risk.

Aldridge and Davenport: Get your act together. Something is wrong with your websites, it'll benefit you greatly to fix it. I'd spend more money on you if it didn't take me 10 minutes waiting for pages to load because you only show x amount of results per page. I laughed when Graham said "Davenports took 18 seconds for a response which is a big improvement"

Rant over! I'm not at all a miserable person but I had to speak up about this particular thing.

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I totally for got about SKS while writing that. Didn't SKS take forever to load also before redirecting people to the JMA website? The SKS domain has a bad SSL certificate warning not to trust them before redirecting to JMA's site. Very professional.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...
On 5/22/2022 at 5:27 PM, nxasdf said:

 

Aldridge and Davenport: Get your act together. Something is wrong with your websites, it'll benefit you greatly to fix it. I'd spend more money on you if it didn't take me 10 minutes waiting for pages to load because you only show x amount of results per page. I laughed when Graham said "Davenports took 18 seconds for a response which is a big improvement"

Rant over! I'm not at all a miserable person but I had to speak up about this particular thing.

 

Hi , Ive worked at Davenports for now " Wow " over 5 years and sadly I have to agree its not fast . 

It used to be , but behind the scenes programs have slowed this down loads ! 

we were looking to revert these issues and the last year we have tried but , they are stuck in harder than we expected, so next step we are working on new things for the future rather than try and repair old things - this is on going but as soon as we have sorted at far greater speeds  - we will tell  everyone about it :-) 

 

In the mean time, if anyone does need help, please feel free to try the website , Use the office phones  we can search items for you , 

Call your local Area sales managers (And myself :-) ) Whats app us ... Email us ... etc etc etc . 

We will help as much as we can . 

Don't forget we also have a book you can download (Or we can post) helping with product and key search . 

 

Here is our Download Page for Free books etc - https://www.davenport-burgess.com/catalogues

 

Regards Tony 

Direct Tel:  07572 216446                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Email: twilkin@davenport-burgess.com                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

DAVENPORT BURGESS, 47 Wednesfield Road, Willenhall, West Midlands, WV13 1AL                                                                                    

t:   01902 366448                                    f:   01902 602472   

e:   sales@davenport-burgess.com                 w:  www.davenport-burgess.com                    FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:  Facebook | Twitter

 Download our full key book FREE here --> http://literature.davenport-burgess.com/KC21_Web/DB_Key_Catalogue21_WEB.pdf

 

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On 6/10/2022 at 12:36 PM, NYKeys said:

But Aldridge no good for key reference comparison AND if you're not on their mega discounts scheme (and I reckon most of us here aren't) they are SO expensive

 

I know our website is running not as fast as we would like but its GREAT for Key X ref like the sample image below . 

Please give it a Try . 

Search ESL1 

Website finds ELS1D and ESL1S

https://www.davenport-burgess.com/search.aspx?s=esl1

 

Regards Tony 

Direct Tel:  07572 216446                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Email: twilkin@davenport-burgess.com                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

DAVENPORT BURGESS, 47 Wednesfield Road, Willenhall, West Midlands, WV13 1AL                                                                                    

t:   01902 366448                                    f:   01902 602472   

e:   sales@davenport-burgess.com                 w:  www.davenport-burgess.com                    FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:  Facebook | Twitter

 Download our full key book FREE here --> http://literature.davenport-burgess.com/KC21_Web/DB_Key_Catalogue21_WEB.pdf

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3 hours ago, Technical Tony / Davenport said:

 

Hi , Ive worked at Davenports for now " Wow " over 5 years and sadly I have to agree its not fast . 

It used to be , but behind the scenes programs have slowed this down loads ! 

 

 

Maybe you should just offer nxasdf money to sort it for you. He makes it look like he could sort it in a realtively short period.

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18 hours ago, grahamparker said:

Maybe you should just offer nxasdf money to sort it for you. He makes it look like he could sort it in a realtively short period.

 

 

Wish it was that easy ,  but there are 100's of 1000's of part numbers to work with and sadly not a small task . :-(  

 

 

 

Regards Tony 

Direct Tel:  07572 216446                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Email: twilkin@davenport-burgess.com                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

DAVENPORT BURGESS, 47 Wednesfield Road, Willenhall, West Midlands, WV13 1AL                                                                                    

t:   01902 366448                                    f:   01902 602472   

e:   sales@davenport-burgess.com                 w:  www.davenport-burgess.com                    FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:  Facebook | Twitter

 Download our full key book FREE here --> http://literature.davenport-burgess.com/KC21_Web/DB_Key_Catalogue21_WEB.pdf

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1 hour ago, NYKeys said:

Tony - trust me - it IS easy with the right competence. You just need somebody who understands optimisation, load balancing, server locations, processor cycles etc

I think it isn’t as simple as some seem to make out. I know how much effort and time has gone into Aldridges website. I was the very first user and even back then there were issues that aren’t a simple fix as much as it may seem. Security and protection against cyber attack being a couple. If it was simple it would have been done by all companies, the money spent on these sites just to keep running and up to date cost a fortune.

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It's just a question of being willing to spend the money. That's all it is. I used to do this for a living. 

Take this as an example, the first example off the top of my head. If you go on the Davenports website and type in U5D, the results for the actual U5D are the last ones!!!

But it's not just Davenports. If you try SKS and search for "U5D Brass" the blanks you're after aren't even on the first page of results. They manage to show 1A Brass blanks right at the bottom, but not the U5D brass blanks!

Another area where our industry is stuck in the past.

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On 6/27/2022 at 12:28 PM, NYKeys said:

It's just a question of being willing to spend the money.

 

Money is being spent sorting this :-)  and hopefully sooner than later we will get there .... 

sadly there is So much work to get there with all the products to be added etc .. 

Soon we hope soon 

 

In the meantime , as mentioned we can always help customers find products / web links etc . to help quicken their searches . 

Please message myself / the office / the Area sales manage etc - we are all here to help . 

thanks . 

 

 

Regards Tony 

Direct Tel:  07572 216446                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Email: twilkin@davenport-burgess.com                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

DAVENPORT BURGESS, 47 Wednesfield Road, Willenhall, West Midlands, WV13 1AL                                                                                    

t:   01902 366448                                    f:   01902 602472   

e:   sales@davenport-burgess.com                 w:  www.davenport-burgess.com                    FOLLOW US ON SOCIAL MEDIA:  Facebook | Twitter

 Download our full key book FREE here --> http://literature.davenport-burgess.com/KC21_Web/DB_Key_Catalogue21_WEB.pdf

 

 

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