Need for Speed – CampgroundViews.com is Smokin’ Fast

In another life I was a mountain bike racer. Cycling back then from Junior High through High School was what defined me. I started riding seriously in 8th grade and rapidly advanced through the various categories. For me it was more about the fun of riding fast. Hills were never an issue, I could motor right up, but all because of the anticipation of the fast swooping ride back down. I didn’t have the fanciest or newest bikes and never received a big money sponsor. Instead I took care of my equipment, made it work flawlessly, and trained every day so come race day when I lined up next to the other guys on fancier bikes I had the edge.

Fast forward to today and this analogy can be transferred over to the company we have built with CampgroundViews.com. This is not just some hobby or “another website” it is a real business providing a real value to campers and RVers the world over. Last month 50,000 people watched our videos of parks across the US another 10,000 utilized our search tools on the site to research their destinations.

The problem, and we know it, is the fact that the website was a little slow to use. It took a beat too long for search results and an extra beat too long for campground information to pop-up. It was great information, could be oh so useful and amazing but argh just too slow… To put some numbers behind it our home page loaded in 3-4 seconds, search results page 10 seconds, and individual listing pages 8-12 seconds! In terms of website speed we were pushing our bikes up the hills!

We Juiced the Server

Behind the scenes though something was brewing. We have been tinkering with the equipment, polishing the code, lubing the electrons, and making what we have be the best it can be. Today I invite you to come test out our little race bike we like to call CampgroundViews.com.

As of this writing the home page loads in 830 milliseconds! That is faster than 93% of ALL websites in the world. It is just a beat shy of what Google loads in!!

fast google

What really counts and where you will absolutely revel in the improvements is on the search result and listing pages. Give it a whirl and you will find the search page loading in 1.5 seconds. Individual campground pages loading in the same time (photos and all). The user experience is night and day; it reminds me of the rush I had racing down the mountains.

Why did we do all of this? Because you deserve the best tools available for planning your trips.

Take the site for a whirl and let us know what you think by commenting below… and remember you don’t need a helmet to ride this bike!

Mark Koep
Founder and CEO
mark-koep-headshot-large

  1. percywittaker.1

    The site is unbelievably fast now. Thank you for all that you are doing. I always tell people about the site but the speed, honestly, has been an issue. I am so glad you made the changes.

    This easily makes Campground Views the best tool out there. It is now even faster than the horrible AllStays app so that sucker is gone!

    Keep up the great work!

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