TECHNOLOGY
Why is my website slow?
Know your top 5 reasons for a slow website and how to fix them
Is your website slow? Do you bite nails every time your website takes forever to load? Well, I have been in this situation. I am a newbie to the world of website construction. I hopped over to YouTube one fine day, learned all that I could, and built a website. But then I stopped over when my website was snailing. How do I make it load faster? That was my question. If you also have the same question, let’s run through the top 5 reasons and ways to fix them.
Before we begin, let me mention Google’s PageSpeed Insights – A helpful tool to obtain the performance reports of the website page. You can find out the data for both mobile and desktop devices. PageSeed Insights also provides suggestions on how a page can be fixed as well. Now let’s dig into speeding up a slow website.
How To Fix A Slow Website?
Optimizing the speed of a website is essential, however, figuring it out and fixing it can be a task. Nevertheless, there are a few quick ways you can implement to speed up that glory of yours.
Optimize Images: Image and video files are of large sizes. If you are going to have lots of them on the page then the speed of the website will be impacted. Optimize media files through compression. It reduces the size by removing unnecessary bytes from the file and improvising the speed.
I use TinyJPG for image compression. TinyJPG is a free tool. It reduces the size of the image without damaging the pixel quality. If you are a WordPress user, you can also try Smush, which is a free plugin offered by WordPress.
Chuck it when you don’t need it: When I built my website, I would install anything that I would want to experiment with. But as I grew up I understood we do not need umpteen plugins or software to run a robust website. Unused elements can build up wastage and clog the masterpiece. Ensure you get rid of the features you do not use. This junk can range from a no longer used feature to an old theme. Run through the admin panel and dispose it of.
Shared Hosting: Let’s talk a bit about shared hosting- Shared hosting is when you share the same web server, bandwidth, RAM, etc.., with other websites. If you have opted for a shared hosting plan then during peak traffic hours your website will tend to crawl. The page loading time will be more since the bandwidth is less. To fix this, you can upgrade your servers and use a CDN (Content Delivery Network). A Content Delivery Network (CDN) consists of numerous servers placed at strategic geographic locations. With this, it is possible to store copies of the website on these servers. Hence when there is a request sent for your website, the local server is used to load your website quickly rather than waiting for the main server to respond.
Dedicated hosting means that the server is just for you. By upgrading to dedicated servers you do not have to worry about the peak time load.
Choose the right web host: Picking the right web host for the purpose of your website can also improvise speed.
Cache it-A.L.W.A.Y.S- Nobody performs when the load is too much, right? It is the same with our websites. When there is a server overload it can slow down the website. For a web page to be displayed, the browsers download web files. When there are too many separate requests at a given point in time the server slows down due to overload. Also, with this, the other factors come into play and ultimately we have a slow appearing web page. So when caching is enabled the files are temporarily stored on the RAM. If the returning visitor wants to view the same page again the files are loaded from the device and the server is not bothered.
A slow website is a no-no. It can wander your potential clients away. Who would wait for minutes in today’s world when we are performing at nanoseconds, isn’t it?
Well, we do invest a lot of time, money, and resources to develop a website. A website is an incredible resource. It offers window shopping to your people, people who are your future customers. The biggest way to market your products/services. So always ensure your website performance is the best, the rest can wait.
And with that, I end my little list of reasons and fixes. Do you have any fixes to share? Is there a hack that worked well for your website? Let me know.
Until then,
Keep Creating
Anjum XoXo
References & Links
- PageSpeed Insights (PSI) – Available at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
- TinyJPG – Smart WebP, JPEG and PNG compression – Available at https://tinyjpg.com/
- Smush – Lazy Load Images, Optimize & Compress Images- Available at https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-smushit/
- Caching – Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_(computing)