Asking yourself "Why is my website so slow"?

Many website visitors either complain about a website’s loading time or that the loading is not smooth, or do quite the antithesis and praise a site for fast loading time and smooth transitions. Everyone, no matter what level of level of technical knowledge he or she may have, appreciates a fast website.

Many business owners do not act on customer complaints regarding loading time of their websites or do not see them in the first place. Unfortunately, however, it is always important in a business to listen when the customer speaks. Failure to do so will most likely result in a significant loss of your customers.

Many times, business owners do not act on customer complaints regarding their websites simply because they do not have the technical knowledge to alleviate the problem. This article will discuss various reasons your website could be loading slowly for your customers.

Where it’s hosted

One big factor in loading issues is where your site is hosted. Most business owners will scour the internet simply looking for the cheapest hosting without fully understanding what is at stake. Searching for the cheapest hosting is synonymous with searching for the slowest hosting. Many companies can offer you cheap hosting because your site is being placed on the same server as hundreds of other sites.

Almost every web hosting company has “shared” hosting that is very cheap, as they know that customers are not looking to spend large amounts of money on dedicated hosting. It is important to keep in mind, however, that these sites are simply having you pay to be placed on a server with hundreds of other sites, and therefore give your site bottom-tier resource access, leading to extremely slow load times.

Many website owners are indifferent to having a faster website, but those who do care about performance typically purchase or rent a semi-dedicated server or fully-dedicated server for their websites. Having a dedicated server is fairly similar to having just your site on the aforementioned “shared” hosting, rather than having it on the server with literally hundreds of other sites. This option offers you the highest share of resources possible, ensuring fast loading times. Semi-dedicated/high-performance hosting environments are still “shared”, but they generally offer a better initial server than the usual “shared hosting” and only allow four to six websites to share the resources on the server, still leading to very fast loading times. Naturally, these are far cheaper than a fully dedicated server.

In short, the better the specifications and dedication of a server, the more you will have to pay. For the best performance, you will need to pay the most, and vice-versa.

Coding Issues

While the hosting environment is certainly important, it is not the only factor in website loading time. One element that can cause slow load times is the back-end or front-end code of your website. This article will discuss the vast number of techniques that have been developed to allow code to be processed on your server more quickly, leading to much faster loading times for your site.

Some sites will give calculate the average load time for pages on your site after navigating through it. You can use the raw data results from such site as a starting ground for server improvement. Such websites typically also make recommendations based on the previously mentioned averages on how to improve your site’s performance.

Another site that can help you to diagnose performance problems with your site is W3C. W3C offers markup validation services for most client-sided website code to ensure it is cleanly coded, and therefore has maximum efficiency. Many sites that fail the markup validation simply were not coded as cleanly as possible to begin with. While myriad companies “cheat” while coding their site by taking shortcuts, these small coding catalysts can actually lead to a much slower front-end website. Take a look at W3C Validation for more information.

Deprecated and outdated code on your website can also drastically slow it down. If your site was coded in a different version of a language than the current one, chances are you are using deprecated code. It is best to review the site and remove any deprecated or even “broken” code. In some cases, especially if the user is using a very new browser and your site is coded with very old code, the site could load incorrectly or even not load at all.

'Too Much' Traffic

Another possible issue that could give your site lackluster performance is too much traffic. “Too much traffic” is very relative to the server on which your website is hosted. The solution to this is never to reduce traffic. More traffic means more visitors, which means more revenue for you. Rather, you should look at upgrading your server to handle the massive traffic you’re getting.

Certain companies can help you out with server upgrades in order to keep up with your growing markets, like endLayer. If you have no way to monitor traffic on your server, you should definitely install Google Analytics, located at http://www.google.com/analytics for free in order to monitor your traffic.

Using all of these services that were discussed can take a lot of work and may still lead to ambiguity. The clearest and fastest way to fix such loading times would be to callFarin Innovations, a companythat can help you by giving you concise website performance data and succinct suggestions to improve your loading times.

Farin Innovations is a Miami, Florida, website design and development company that also specializes in social media strategy, search engine optimization, and other internet based services. Take a look at more about what we do or give us a call today to consult on your specific website or websites!