Is this a bug in the website or are the programmers at my company right when they say it's not a bug?

Question

Where I work my company hosts a website for customers. There's an issue that's gone one for about 3 years and many customers have complained about it. One has even left. The website we host sends out an email to a client with a link in it. A user clicks the link and then its supposed to redirect them to our website. When a customer clicks it, it sometimes takes 5-10 minutes to load. The programmers always so "it's the internet connection for the client, there's nothing we can do". Then clients have checked their internet speed and it's pretty good.

Update:

Or is there not enough info to tell

Update 2:

The programmers always say*

Answer 1

Random or intermittent problems like that can be extremely difficult to diagnose.  It's quite common for programmers to avoid dealing with issues like this since it can be like searching for a needle in a haystack, but they should put in some statistical logging to see how many people are actually affected by this bug.   I doubt it's the client's internet connection.  Probably related to a congested or poorly implemented database server.  You need to push the upper managers to take it seriously.   I would at least try to get the statistical logging system implemented to see how serious of an issue it really is, since I'm sure many clients don't report it every time.   Managers love statistical reports so I'm sure you will get more traction pushing for that. 

Answer 2

This is not enough information.

Answer 3

You need to gather a bunch of stats on all of the 

different emails used -- Outlook, gMail, Hotmail, 

etc. As someone has already mentioned, I bet 

you're going to find that the ones reporting the 

worst performance are those using Outlook.

Answer 4

Five to ten minutes is unacceptable. If a lot of your customers experience it, the problem is definitely on your end. It's either the internet connection or settings of your servers.

Answer 5

Not enough info.

If it in fact does load in five to ten minutes on occasion

and if it loads much faster for the typical customer

that suggests that the problem is not DIRECTLY related to the web site.

If the delayed load happens repeatedly for specific customers

that suggests that it is hardware or software that they are using

or their internet connection

that is the culprit.

However: it could be

that it is programmed in such a way

that a specific combination of software and/or hardware cause the problem

***that could be taken into account and remedied at the web site end of things***.

For example: loading fonts can be very time-consuming for a mobile device

and so if the web site uses non-standard fonts

mobile devices, especially those with slow connections and/or slow processors and/or limited RAM

can take a long time to load a page.

The solution in that case

would be to NOT USE fonts that need to load.

I.e. the example problem

even though only a problem when using a specific combination of customer (client) hardware

could be resolved and overcome by programmers at the web site (server) end of things.

Answer 6

If the website isn't proprietary, post the site URL.

Post over what is in the email by hovering over it and copy the link, then

paste it in.

There are online tools that will give how long each component takes to load.  You just need the URL.

5-10 minutes, I'd suspect most of it is not being served correctly.

Sometimes you need the answer to before you talk to programmers, even though this seems to be more of a networking/operational problem.

Answer 7

If this happens to customers no matter where they're connecting from, the programmers are wrong to blame the customers' connections. Sounds like it's at the server end, or the handshake between customer's ISP and the server.

Clearly the company doesn't care enough to find the bug and fix it. That says a lot.

Answer 8

For every 50 programmers, there is usually only one who knows what he is talking about.