7 Root Causes of A Slow Website
Gone are the days when people had a lot of patience, these days nobody likes to wait. These days it’s a very rare sight to see people waiting in a queue to book tickets for movies or flights or anything that you can think of. Every task, big or small, simple or difficult, can be easily accomplished with the help of the internet.
Everyone takes it for granted that their work can be done in jiffy if they get it done online. What happens when their only resort too starts lagging behind? Where would these people go in search of other alternatives to the online process? This happens plenty of times. People visit a website for one or the other purpose, and if it takes more than 1.5 seconds to load, say goodbye to those visitors who drive the traffic you need to generate revenue. Yes, that’s how much time people are willing to patiently wait for you, 1.5 seconds! If you aren’t fast enough to keep up with the required speed, you lose out customers forever. Funny how all it takes is 1.5 seconds to decide the amount of money you would be generating. So, ever wonder why is your website lagging behind in this race to generate an unbeatable amount of traffic or why have people stopped looking you up and instead land up on your competitors’ websites? The answer to this might not require a Sherlock Holmes kind of enquiry, it’s just that your website takes a lot of time to load, i.e, it’s slow.
Having a slow website is similar to digging your own grave, you won’t survive long! Everything in the universe has a reason why it is, like it is. So there are plenty of reasons explaining why your website moves with a snail’s pace. So hold on to your magnifying glass and let’s go through the reasons why your website is running at a slow pace-
Massive images:
If your website contains plenty of images, it would take more time to load than the ones with lesser images. Unoptimized images are the ones responsible for your website loading at such a slow pace. Since these images are big in size, they draw heavily on the server’s resources thereby slowing down the speed. So what you can do is, reduce the size of your image with the help of various optimising tools that are available online. These would help you reduce the size of the image without compromising the quality of the image. So, what I am implying is that, when you are about to upload an image, it should be around 100kb or even less than it. This would ensure that images aren’t the culprit in slowing down your website.
Your server can be the culprit:
Many a times, no matter what you do, your website is still a slowpoke. Your server would be the culprit in this matter. If you are a resident of the shared hosting platform, you would be sharing your resources with plenty of other users, so if your website is taking too much time to load, this indicates that you are in line to avail of the resources being shared. Your server’s poor performance can be the reason that your visitor ditch you mid way.
No flashes please!
Nobody likes flashy stuff! Here we are targeting the flash drives that you put up on your website. This tends to make your website sluggish. These flash drives tend to weigh you down and how! If your website is loaded with unwanted themes, plug-ins or comments, remove them right away. There’s no need to unnecessarily weigh yourself down. So say no to flashes!
Say no to videos
Having videos on your website is a great way of making it interactive and adds to the attractive quotient. But it acts as an hinderance when it comes to your website’s loading speed. It eats up more space and makes your website heavier. So it takes more time for your website to load. So, the bottom line is- you can have videos on your website but not more than necessary. Obviously you need to interact with your audience, so have videos on your website but not in a bulk!
You don’t cache your data
Caching would become your best buddy when you realise what it does to help you clear away the unnecessary stuff that slow down your website. You can see an impressive difference in your website’s loading time after caching your files. You can use the Google Webmaster Tool to diagnose the problems with your website and the results would help you make improvements to it and thereby speed up your website’s functionings.
Too much traffic!
When you have too much traffic to your website, it spells good news for your piggy banks. But what if this is the reason behind your website’s slow spell? Many a times, when there is too much of traffic being directed to your website, it can slow you down. Your server would be overloaded as well because it would be bombarded with so many requests. So what you can do is, wish for ample of traffic, but it should be borne easily by the server.
The Server’s location
Your server’s location plays an important role in determining the speed of your website. If your website is operational from India and you have your servers in the US, it slows down your speed.
When you click a link on the website, you are sending a request to the server and the physical location of the server plays a major role in determining the amount of time in which the request is processed and the results are made available. So, if you are an Indian user, better look for a web host with their servers located in the same country.
Your website is your brainchild, destined to take you to new heights. Unlike what the earlier adage- “slow and steady wins the race” stated, if you are a slowpoke, consider yourself out of the game even before it begins. The only thing that can take you places is a faster and more efficient website, and if your website is slow, any of the above mentioned factors can be the cause of it. In addition to putting you on guard, use your magnifying glass more closely on the parts where you are given certain ideas about how to overcome these problems, because every problem has a solution to it, all it takes is some prodding to find it. So, as I mentioned earlier, people are very short on patience these days, so zoom past your competitors and let your website keep minting money for you.