04 Jun 4 Most Common Factors That Slow Down Websites
Having a website that is slow to load is in many ways something like a bullet to your chances of having significant success in a large way. Unfortunately, if your website takes too long to load, then a good portion of people are going to simply turn away from your site and not wait, which means that you are wasting your position in the SERPs and losing a huge number of customers who might otherwise click adds or buy products.
In short if your site is a slow loader, then it’s time that you did something about it. Here we will look at four reasons that your site might be slow to load and what you can do about that.
Large Images
Having huge images on your page means that there’s a lot for browsers to load and a lot of information to transfer. If you want to make your site load faster then you need to make sure that you don’t have too many big files loading up and that means pictures most of all as the number one culprits.
There are several solutions to this problem. One is to simply not load up as many images or images that are as large by not including them as part of your web design. If your site currently requires a lot of huge images in the background for instance, then maybe you could swap to a solid color or a repeating image – which many people find less distracting anyway.
Likewise it’s important not to resize images in the browser. If your HTML dictates that ‘width = 100’ and the image is 500 pixels large, then your site will load a huge image for no reason. Make sure you create smaller files for your thumbnails so you can call those up. Finally consider simply changing the format of the images which can also make them smaller.
Heavy Code At the Top of Your Pages
Your site loads in the order that your HTML appears in your code. In other words what is written at the top of the page will load first and vice versa. If you have a lot of Java at the top of your page then, your site is going to have to load that first before you will get access to it.
As such then it is important that you put heavy code like this at the bottom of your page so that it’s not in the first thing that has to load. Likewise anything else heavy that doesn’t need to be at the top of the page can be added to the bottom of the script.
No Cache
Browsers store a lot of what they see in their cache, so that if they load it again they can do so more quickly and without having to rely on their connection. However in order for something to be used by the web cache it needs to be a file and not just part of a file.
As such then, you can speed up your site by putting any code that gets used regularly across your site in include files or external CSS scripts rather than including it inline. This way the browser can simply see that the heading and menu is the exact same as the one it’s already loaded countless times and the images are all the same, and it will only need to worry about quickly loading up the content.
Hosting Service
Your hosting service can affect the speed of your site in numerous ways and this comes down to the speed of the connection that the server has, as well as the bandwidth you’re provided with. To speed up your site, it might be time simply to move it over to a better hosting company or to upgrade your existing package.
Bianca was surprised to see that her website loaded slowly even when she had fixed all other problems like large images and caching. Turns out her shared hosting couldn’t handle the traffic. She immediately moved her site to a Orlando data center based colocation host.
