Website Slow or Down

Slow website performance or minor outages can happen to everyone from time to time, but it can drive you crazy when it does. Don't worry; it drives us crazy, too. We have multiple systems in place to try to maximize the uptime of our website and minimize the slowness; however, sometimes, the Internet just doesn't cooperate. This article has some basic options you can look into to troubleshoot this type of issue.

If you see slower-than-normal performance from the StockCharts.com website, or if you are not able to access the website at all, there are a couple of things you can do to determine if the problem is on our end, on your end, or somewhere in between.

Check the Speed/Availability of Other Websites

The first thing to do is to determine whether or not you are experiencing similar slow performance or inaccessibility on other websites, or if it's just at StockCharts. If it is happening around the web, you'll need to look into potentially fixing the issue at your end, as discussed below.

Note: Just because other websites are quick and we are slow doesn't necessarily mean that the problem is on our end. Please try the other troubleshooting steps below to narrow things down further.

Check Our Twitter Feed

If the problem seems limited to StockCharts.com, you can check our Twitter feed to see if other people are reporting problems or if we have sent out any messages about site outages or slowness problems. If we are already tweeting about a problem with our site, there's no need to continue troubleshooting on your part; we'll get the issue sorted out as promptly as possible.

Fixing Issues on Your End

This may just be a temporary problem located within the Internet itself. If you haven't made any recent changes to your computer's configuration and the speed/connectivity issues just started today, we suggest waiting a bit to see if things clear up on their own.

If the problem persists or if you have reason to believe there may be a problem with your computer's configuration, then here are some other things you can try:

• Try restarting your computer, especially if you haven't restarted it in a while. This can clear out hung or stuck programs and plug-ins that could be slowing things down.

• Check to ensure that internet security programs like Norton or McAfee are not causing the problem. They may be needlessly checking our charts for viruses, which can cause slowness.

• Run an Internet speed test at SpeedTest.net. For best results, choose a server in the Washington, DC area.

• Consider changing the DNS server settings on your computer so that it points to the free OpenDNS service instead of your ISP's servers. While this requires a little technical knowledge, many people have reported significant improvement in overall internet speed after making this change. For more information, please see our article on Using OpenDNS.

• Try using a different web browser, such as Firefox or Google Chrome. If the slowness is due to plugins or a configuration issue with your old browser, switching to a different browser may fix things.

If those suggestions don't solve the problem, contact your ISP for assistance. If you discover the culprit, please let us know so we can improve our help documentation.