1. Unoptimized Images
A large volume of unoptimized images is usually the most common reason behind website slowness. High-resolution images can consume lots of bandwidth while loading. Uploading larger sized images and then scaling them down can unnecessarily increase the size of your web page -- causing your website to load slowly.
The image format is another important factor to consider.
Many modern site uses .webp format to display their image, although safari does not currently support it, it is a still a great way to optimize image file size without sacrificing too much quality.
Takeaways:
- Check the file size of your images, anything above 200kb will require some decision making, does your content really need it?
- Unoptimized images takes long time for your website to load, you might need to load large image asynchronously to avoid long load time.
2. Not Making Use of Caching Techniques
Caching is known to improve the performance of websites by leaps and bounds. If you're not caching, you're missing out. It's a technique that let's you store frequently used data points in the 'cached memory'.
Any subsequent requests for the same content gets served from the cached memory, thus speeding up the whole data retrieval process.
By implementing browser/HTTP caching and server-side caching, you are likely to experience a huge improvement in the performance of your website.
Takeaways:
- Although caching does not help much on the first load, subsequent load can be improved drastically.
- Caching can be done on any data, however be mindful of the additional storage required for this method to work.
3. Unoptimized Code
Another common culprit for website slowness is unoptimized coding. When you make your website, excessive white spaces, inline stylings, empty new lines and unnecessary comments can make the website stylesheet grow larger in size. Messy logic can lead to unnecessary operations that slows down performance.
By writing clean code and removing these unnecessary elements, you can compress the code, reduce the file size and improve the overall page load time and if you're tracking rankings you'll probably see a boost in your SEO performance too.
Takeaways:
- Attention to detail matters.
- Minify is a technique many website build automatically, but it is still worthy to know.
- Write clean logic is the key to improve performance of your website functionalities
4. Not Using gZIP Compression
By enabling gZIP compression, you instruct the server to wrap all the web objects images, CSS, JavaScript files etc in a single container before they are sent over to the requesting browser.
Compression lowers response time by reducing the size of data being transferred between your server and the visitors' browser, which in turn helps in serving the requested content much faster.
Takeaways:
- gZIP compression is an easy performance win.
- It wraps up all your web objects (images, CSS, JS) in a single container to be sent to requesting browser
5. Too Many Ads
No doubt display advertisements are great for monetizing high traffic websites.
But that shouldn't come at the cost of compromised performance or user experience. Don't let too many ads be another reason why your website is slow!
The most obvious impact of overloading your website with advertisements is the addition of HTTP requests, which would need additional processing time.
To sum things up, limiting the number of display advertisements will ensure better performance for your website. However, there may be some creative options outside of limiting ads.
Takeaways:
- Advertisements are additional HTTP requests and slow down page loading time.
6. Not Using a CDN Service
A CDN service is a distributed network of independent servers deployed in different geographic locations, that can serve web content to visitors with high availability and high performance.
Depending upon the geographic location of your visitor, the requested content gets served by the node located at the nearest available data center. It would minimize the round-trip-time (RTT) and serve the requested content in a much quicker time.
Takeaways:
- Not mandatory, but CDN can help. Especially if you have visitors from around the world.
- CDN caches frequently accessed data in geographically distributed datacenters.
- They can help minimize round-trip-time (RTT) and serve content faster for your audiences.
7. Bad Hosting
Your web hosting service provider makes a huge difference when it comes to website performance. Yes, your slower-than-average page load speed may not be entirely your own fault.
If you have tried correcting all the above-mentioned causes and yet your website seems to be responding slowly, then switching your hosting provider may just solve your problem. Choose a hosting provider that offer performance optimization services bundled in the price of the hosting.
Conclusion
Here you have it, website page load speed depends on a variety of factors such as unoptimized images, a high number of HTTP requests, bulky codes, and JavaScript issues to name a few. Here at DW Interactive Dev, website performance is our top priority and we make sure your website is as fast as it can be before launch.
