7 reasons responsible for slow performance of the website

Website performance is a reflection of the efficiency and credibility of your company or organization. From the most technical power users to people just learning how the Internet works, a slow website is a slow site.

A website is an integral part of every business. A website is your portal to a customer's interest. A site that is slow and sluggish will typically bore potential customers before they can find interest in your project. This mandates for them to update on a regular basis. What matters most in making the website available to the users is maintaining its loading speed. In this busy technology based world, no one has more than a minute to stick to a single website. And if the pages download slowly; then, it is entirely possible that the site may lose its customers. It is important to have a website that is exciting and intriguing to establish a place in the online market. But, few simple mistakes may lead to disastrous problems. With the changing time scenarios, website development is becoming more and more complex that calls for individual functional errors at times. But, it is imperative for the designers and developers to keep a constant check on them for maintaining the essential loading speed of the website.

Reasons for slow performance of the website

The following are some of the main reasons for slow loading sites:

1.Unoptimized images

A Large volume of unoptimized images is usually the most common reason behind website slowness. High resolutions images can consume lots of bandwidth while loading. So, take the time to re-size your images. Take a look at the image tag – it allows you to set the height and width. Be sure to scale the photos proportionally so that they don't get stretched.

Uploading larger sized images and then scaling them down can unnecessarily increase the size of your web page - causing your website to load slowly. Then, consider changing image format, which can significantly reduce the file size. Finally, reduce image quality. No, that doesn't mean making your photos look bad. It just means tweaking some simple settings. For example, JPEG images are much smaller in size compared to other image formats like PNG or GIF. Quite naturally, your web page will load faster if you are using JPEG images instead of PNG/GIF.

2.Unnecessarily use of flash

Flash presentations add value to the entire website; but, too much of it slows down the site loading. This can be incredibly annoying at times for the users, and they will go the other website that happens to serve better results within much less time. The use of Flash is pretty much an outdated process these days; still, certain companies rely on Flash based designs. Having a Flash header is fine; but, more than that in websites can kill its audience.

3.JavaScript Issues

The availability of JavaScript/jQuery plugins has made it convenient to add dynamic content to websites. However, if implemented incorrectly, JavaScript can cripple your site's page load speed. It takes time for jQuery & JavaScript to load, interpreted and executed. So if you are using multiple API calls to render JavaScript/jQuery data, it can result in a significant delay while loading the web pages.

4.Excessive HTTP request

Everything in a website has to be in correct proportion; be it an image, content or anything else. Extreme of image, coding, or CSS may pose a threat to the loading process of a website because as the site hits browser, it happens to carry out a separate request for each file. Combining them all together in one file or operating at the same time will reduce loading time.

Having lots of JavaScript, CSS, and image files can lead to too many HTTP requests. When a user visits your web page, the browser performs several requests to load each of these files - which can significantly reduce the page load speed.

5.Bad shared web hosting

Even though shared web hosting is the most cost-effective way of hosting a website, it could affect the loading speed of a website, especially if it's a dynamic and complex data driven websites. It is because, on a shared web hosting, the server resources like data, memory, disc space, etc. are shared with various sites hosted on the same server, which cuts on the loading time for a web page. Though it won't be a big concern for sites that are not too much dynamic or that may not have much web traffic, moving to a Dedicated or VPS or Cloud hosting can improve the loading speed considerably for any types of websites.

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6.Not Using a CDN Service

When you are concerned about websites rate, you should seriously consider using a Content Delivery Network. 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. CDN mainly help internet content like texts, images, graphics, media files, download able documents, etc. from the nearest data centers to the users which in turn increases the loading speed of the website. On not using a CDN, as in the case with regular servers, the websites will not open faster to other users beyond that server area, and this will limit the performance of the site to the targeted audience.

7.Not using Caching techniques

Caching is known to improve the performance of websites by leaps and bounds. It's a technique that lets you store frequently used data points in the 'cached memory.' Any subsequent requests for the same content get served from the cache memory, thus speeding up the whole data retrieval process. By implementing browser/HTTP caching and server-side caching, you are likely to experience a remarkable improvement in the performance of your websites.

Conclusion

Online business works on the base of the efficiently operated websites. In fact, it is the mode of connecting people with concerned companies willing to sell their products or services. This is the reason that websites have to designed, developed and maintained appropriately to create a huge network. Having a slow loading site can not only be frustrating, but it may also affect bounce rate, conversion, user satisfaction, revenue and a host of other business metrics. Not to forget, fast page load time aids in achieving higher page rank in organic search results – which can be a contributing factor in the success of any online business.