In a world of instant gratification in almost every field, it is unheard of for a popular website to be slow. With as little as a second of loading time putting people off, it is easy to see why a lot of companies are working hard to make sure that they can load their pages nice and fast. Of course, though, this process can be a challenge, as figuring out what might be making your site slow down isn’t a simple process. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring some of the most common causes of a sluggish site.

Large Images/Videos

Photos from a lot of high-end DSLR and mirrorless cameras come out at several megabytes in size. While this makes them look great and enables easy editing, it can make it very hard for a website to be loaded, and most websites will be made to be less than a handful of megabytes in their entirety. Along with this, video can be a big culprit in when you’re loading a website. CDN services are some of the best when you’re trying to take this work out of your hands.

No Caching

When people visit your site, the pages which are loaded can be cached by various servers and the user’s computers themselves. The more this happens, the faster the site will start to load for those coming to see it, giving you an easy way to boost your load times. Of course, you will need to have a system in place to make this happen, though. With platforms like WordPress, it is nice and easy to enable caching with a simple plugin.

Poor Compression And Minification

Browsers are very good at reading minified and compressed files, and don’t need all of the necessary bits which usually come in CSS and Javascript documents. A lot of caching tools can handle this part of the job for you, enabling Gzip compression, while also making sure that your code is as compact as possible. A lot of people can handle this by themselves, as the tools you have available make it very easy.

Slow Servers

The server which is hosting your website will always impact the time it takes for it to load. You can find reviews of different hosting companies, giving you an idea of what their machines can do, while also ensuring that you choose the best for your needs. This sort of issue can be solved by companies like globalapptesting.com, but you will have to follow the actions the suggest if you want to make a difference. Having a dedicated server will often be the very best way to handle this, as it will make it much easier to monitor and improve the delivery speed of the site.

Large User Volumes

Having a lot of people coming to a website will almost always slow it down. The server hosting it will only be able to manage a set bandwidth, dictating the amount of users who can be on the website at the same time. Most hosting companies claim to offer unlimited bandwidth, but will limit areas like CPU and memory usage; both of which will be needed to keep the site running under load. You can find loads of resources around the web which help you to understand what your host is giving you.

Background Scripts

A lot of websites rely on languages like Javascript and PHP to provide the experience which their users love, enabling dynamic content and server-side operations to be handled while the pages load. Unfortunately, though, too many of these scripts are very heavy on your server. This will usually only cause issues when excessive scripts are being used, and most websites won’t have to deal with this sort of issue.

Embedded Content

Having another website’s content to display on your own pages can be a great way to make your website more interesting. If you embed content from a website which is slow, though, you will find a knock on effect impacting your website. This sort of slowness will be very easy to spot, and can leave large portions of pages unloaded before the user sees them. To avoid this, it will be worth testing the speed of your embeds before letting them go live.

Hopefully, this post will give you everything you need to start making a real difference to the loading times on your website. While this work may not seem that important, it can have a huge impact on the usability of your website, while also making it harder for users to find it. It will be easy to see the difference once you’ve worked on this area for a while.