There are many causes for slow page load times in websites, and many of of them are completely avoidable. Slow page load times come with far-reaching implications that spread their tentacles into your revenue and brand. Long story short, this is not good for business as many customers will look for alternative providers of your service if you force them to wait for more than 2-3 seconds for your page to load.
A slug in the general performance of the site generally means you are worse off in other areas not visible to your business associates and customers. Before delving into the price you actually get to pay for slow loading times, it’s probably a good idea to understand some of the most common causes of slow page loading time.
Below are some of the major causes of slow loading time.
Poor Hosting Choices
One of the common causes of slow website loading is poor hosting services. However, in most of the cases the users choose low value hosting packages significantly affecting the efficiency of the website. The many versions of hosting products often come with varying resource allowances, which should be in line with your needs as client. An example of a high-end managed provider that offers support for things like NGiNX, Varnish, and Memcached is EuroVPS.com. Make sure you choose a managed hosting provider with experience in web performance optimisation services as this can drastically reduce your stress levels in debugging performance issues.
Server-Side Intensive Scripts
These are also major hurdles as far as fast loading is concerned. Scripts that have to execute on the servers before loading often cause a jam in your websites. The solution here is to deploy as much code as possible to the client side and use JavaScript and jQuery to achieve the same. Ride on new technologies such as caching so that the heavy code is loaded only once on the clients’ browsers. This will save them considerable time in the second and subsequent visits.
Too Much Flash
Too much flash and memory-intensive shockwaves slow down the loading time of the website especially for users with slow internet. The solution is to utilize XML to load external data or just ride on HTML5 and CSS3 as it is by far lightweight. This will also help you to load minimalist versions of your website on mobile browsers thus increasing visitor satisfaction. Flash should only be used when you are certain of your visitors’ rapid internet connection.
Un-Optimized Images
Images that have not been optimized for web are often hard to load in slow internet connections. The clarity levels of JPEG images for optimized images is always 60%, meaning the image that loads is blurred though the original copy in the server is very clear. PNG images are often antialiased, so that they can load in stages as opposed to one-off loading. Using images un-optimized can cause serious speed problems.
Non Compression Of Web Pages
Web pages can be compressed into a gzip using a unique algorithm then decoded at the browser. This has been used by major tech firms delivering heavy content and it can save considerable load time. If your pages are slow and you feel they are bloated with necessary media, you should consider compressing them at the server level.
Bulky Code
Bulk code refers to unnecessarily long lines of code that clog a server. This may be in the form of the following un-smart coding practices.
- Use of unnecessary white spaces
- Deep nesting of HTML tags
- Implicit declarations and ambiguous code on the backend code
- Inline styling
The solution lies in use of tact while doing the front end and the backend of the pages. It can save considerable load time that will in turn make some extra million dollars yearly for your company.
Use Of External Resources Such As CSS And JavaScript
CSS and JavaScript should be served once for your website. Do not dwell on fetching them from external sites unless you have a well coded mirror system that calculates the fastest server and loads automatically. Again, use caching to save the styling of your page on the users cookies so that it is only leaded once. The styles and the JavaScript must be compressed by eliminating unnecessary carriage returns and whitespaces. For a start, use the HTML optimizer, it is awesome and open source.
Basing Design On Tables And Frames Instead Of CSS And DIV
For the designers, the pages’ themes must be rendered in the HTML as CSS styles, and DIV segments as opposed to complicated tables and Framesets. Frames are an archaic way of expressing a theme and often lead to too many parameters in the design. This bloated way of coding can be avoided by using DIV tags as dividers and using CSS to define the size, formatting, rendering and orientation of the dividers.
Embedding External Media
Another related cause to slow loading is sourcing external media from third party websites. Depending on other hosting providers for core content in your site is not a great idea at all. For instance, if you load a video from YouTube, there is a great possibility that your visitors will have trouble loading pages when the YouTube servers are down. Keep everything local as far as you can.
Spamming From Your Forms
A whole lot of spam comes from users and engines actively spamming your servers with illegal requests and submitting multiple forms with illegally auto generated data. This is a common World Wide Web ill that is basically launched by competitor sites or sabotage hackers. The first thing to do here is to lock your forms on the client side using anti-spamming scripts. Plugins like Captcha will come in handy here and help your capture spammers on the act.
Limit visibility of classified pages that may expose your scripts to hackers. Finally use anti-spamming software at the gateways of your servers to limit multiple requests from one client.
With little luck, your pages are bound to load faster once you explicitly deal with these common sources of the slug. The trick is to do all of them as none will work in exclusivity.