When was the last time you revisited your website? Have you ever noticed how slow it can be?
The speed at which a site loads up in your browser, adds a lot of value with the attachment that you have with the site. And most likely you will never remember the slow-loading ones.
How a site loads up, is also valuable for business propositions, and possible customers. A bad customer wait time can lead to the business losing a potential customer and look unprofessional.
This article will guide you through the reasons why your website is slow and the best practices to help your website speed up.
Why My Website is Slow?
The speed of loading up of the site depends on the type of web host and the web hosting plan selected.
Selecting the right web hosting company, with the right statistics of RPO and RTO, should be the first step in taking your website to the world.
Web hosting companies, have both shared as well as dedicated plans. Every web hosting company has to cater to customers with varied budgets to host their websites.
Depending on the content of the website, the business strategy around the products on the website, and the number of users that are estimated to visit the website, a web hosting company would be able to guide you on the most appropriate option to host your website.
If one thing is true about your website, it’s that the loading speed matters. When your site loads slowly, you will not only provide a poor user experience, but you will also rank lower in the search engines.
Before we move into the web hosting areas that can improve the speed of loading for your site, we need to look at some basics when it comes to improving the speed for your website.
How to Fix & Speed Up Your Website
The below five steps have to be used while designing the website:
1. Enable Caching
When a visit is made to the site, certain common elements on the site, are stored in the cache, so that the next time you visit the site, it can access those elements from the cache itself (instead of visiting the relevant folder on the web hosting server), and loads much faster.
With the caching enabled, the browser, instead of having to download every single resource, it has to download only a few of them.
By turning on the caching mode, you can improve the return visitors on your site. There are plugins, based on the code type, which can let you enable site wide caching, or caching of a certain site elements.
2. Remove Resource Hogging Plugins and Add-ons
If the site is running too many plugins, which could potentially be slowing down your website.
It is very important from the site loading perspective, to check up on the plugins that hog resources.
To understand and identify these, the first step should be to use a baseline tool for the website.
After the baselines are available, go ahead and disable the plugins, one after the other – after every disable, run the baseline tool. The results will help you identify the ones that hog resources.
3. Optimize and Reduce the Size of Your Images
If your website has images that are not optimized, then this will negatively impact the loading time for your site and will not give an optimized user experience.
The below steps should help you overcome this problem:
- Ensure that the images are not unnecessarily large
- Install plugins that will automatically reduce the size of the images based on your page
- Before you upload the image, do run them through tools like TinyPNG, to reduce the size of the image, without sacrificing on the quality.
4. Minimize Your Code
Sometimes website’s code can become messy and will lead to longer loading time and bad user experience.
Usage of CMS tools and website builder could put unnecessary line breaks, spaces and other elements that you do not want to be there.
It would also be a good idea to minimize the CSS and Javascripts as well.
Alternatively, you can keep the CSS and JavaScripts in the same folder so that it does not have to go to different places looking for the relevant ones and thereby slowing down the speed.
5. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
The loading speed of the site is affected by the proximity of the user to the web hosting server where your site files are stored.
The further the distance from the user and the web hosting server, the slower the site will load. Here is where the role of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) comes into play.
A CDN network distributes your site files across a network of global servers, that way your users can access your site via the servers that are closest to their location.
Using a CDN will definitely improve your site’s user experience, but this is also an additional cost that needs to be budgeted for.
6. Drives on the Hosted Server – NVMe SSD
The above steps are the ones that you can do to your website design. It is equally important to check out the hardware that the web hosting companies use.
As you would always identify when you choose a laptop / hardware to work on, you would always look at the processing and retaining speed, as compared to the robustness of the hardware.
To get an optimum output from your server, it is important that the hard disks, which store the site pages are quick to respond and index.
Gone are the days, when it would take minutes for the site to load. These days with the invention of the NVME SSDs, things have become faster.
Thereby, you would need to understand what the NVME SSD does to boost your experience with the site.
NVME (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a communications interface and driver that defines a command set and feature set for PCIe- defined SSDs.
Basically, it is a controller interface that works with the SSDs. NVME SSDs are smaller than conventional HDDs, and often hold as much or more data and are often faster.
Related: NVMe, SATA & SAS: Which is the Fastest Speed
NVME SSD is a more efficient and faster method to access non-volatile memory, compared to even the SATA SSDs.
For more information on the technologies, do visit us at Exabytes Busines Web Hosting Plans.
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