Top 5 reasons your website is loading slow

If your website is loading slowly check out the following reasons why this may be the case and what  can be done to improve website performance.

1.  Un-optimised Images

A large number of un-optimised images is the most common cause behind a sluggish website. High resolution images can take up a lot of bandwidth while loading.

Another consideration is the image file type, for example JPG files are typically smaller in size than PNG and GIF files and can generally be compressed a lot more.

Remedy & Takeaway:

• Check the file size of your images, at best 50kb or less per image is desirable or even less if you can get away with it, certainly anything over 1Mb is too large.
• There will always be a trade-off for image quality and file size.
• large images should always be compressed for mobile devices to reduce the end users data usage.

2. Script issues & Fonts

Javascript

Javascript  and other libraries like jQuery have made is easy to add a range of dynamic content and  animated effects to web pages. However inefficient or unnecessary scripts can cause havoc with your websites load speed including some social media plugins like Facebook page plugins.

Web Fonts

Google fonts are a great way to add a range of free fonts to your page, however adding too many fonts can impact on page load speed - Google fonts usually specify the load speed for each font so be mindful of this when chosing fonts. Also worth a mention are premium web fonts, as they can impact on page load speed too - MyFonts for example also use a hit counter to register the volume of site traffic for the purpose of font licensing, so http requests like this will also impede page load speed.

Remedy & Takeaway:

• Examine all scripts on your site and remove any that are unnecessary this will reduce the number of http requests.
• Minify any large scripts as much as possible to compress file size and increase load speed.
• Consider using a CDN (content delivery network) to load your scripts where possible, although this is questionable.
• Enable server side caching.
• Limit your webfonts or choose faster loading fonts.
• Unless your website is in the 20% slowest sites then you really shouldn't bother optimising for speed.

3. Bloated code

Another common cause of slow loading site pages is unmaintained or unclean code. When your site was  in the process of development there may have been a lof of unnecessary elements still left within the code including –  too much white space, empty lines, inline styles, redundant code, excessive code comments.

Remedy & Takeaway:

• Don’t use inline css
• Don’t use multiple css stylesheets as these just increase http requests  and should be combined into a single file.
• minify css stylesheets!

4. Not Using gZIP Compression

This is such an easy fix and it is surprising how may web hosts have this disabled by default!

By enabling  gZIP compression you instruct the server to compress all content before it is served to the browser.

Compression lowers response time by reducing the size of data being transferred between your weh hosts server and the end users browser, which in turn helps in serving the requested content much faster.

Remedy & Takeaway:

• Login to your web hosting account and Enable gZip compression in Cpanel – it is usually found under “optimise site”.
• gZip compression can be enabled for select file types.

5. Substandard Hosting

Your web hosting service provider makes a big difference when it comes to website performance. So  your slower-than-average page load speed may not be your own fault.

Try all of the above remedies  first as these are easy wins, however if  your website still seems to be responding slowly, then switching your hosting provider may just solve your problem but bear in mind that that transferring from one host to another can have its own share of problems too if not done correctly – so make sure everything is backed up or ask your new hosting provider for assistance.

• Always choose an Australian based hosting provider, don't make your website visitors wait for pages to load.
• Choose a hosting provider that offers performance optimisation services included in the price of the hosting.
• Slow loading websites shouldn’t be an issue if your web hosting provider knows what they are doing.

Also worth a mention...

An additional cause of a slow loading website can also be attributed to a sudden & massive spike in traffic to your website - this should be investigated to verify if the traffic is legitimate or due to organic spam.

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