My Website Is Slow
Having a slow loading website can be frustrating, and can lead to less traffic visiting your site. If yousite relies heavily on ecommerce or advertisements this could result in substantially less revenue being generated by your website.
There are many reasons a website may be slow.
1 A huge spike in Additional Traffic.
2 A Dynamic Site without caching.
3 Extremely Large or non-optimized graphics.
4 Extremely Large or non-optimized database.
5 Large amount of calls to external websites (twitter, facebook, youtube, etc...)
6 Connectivity issues
All of these issue fall into three categories: Traffic issues, Site optimization, and configuration issues.
Traffic Issues
Traffic Density:
One common issue with websites suddenly becoming slow is traffic density. Traffic density is often the desired result of a well created website. However depending on the type of hosting plan you have, the type of scripts on your site, and how optimized your site is, this can have an adverse effect. There are several ways to handle high traffic density.
· Upgrade your hosting plan
· Use a caching service like CloudFlare to reduce the load cost of your commonly accessed pages
· Use the tools on this page to locate the contributing factors and manage them rather than the traffic density itself
Connectivity Issues:
Another common cause for websites to unexpectedly become slow is connectivity issues. Connectivity issues often cause sites to appear slow when they may not actually be running slow at all. Connectivity issues are typically a local issue, which means that your site may only be loading slowly for you. There are several ways in which you can diagnose connectivity issues.
· InternetSupervision - web based software that tests connection to your website from several locations around the world to locate problems.
· Traceroute - There are lots of websites offering traceroute services, and several ways to run a traceroute with a desktop application. One reliable service which also supports other connectivity tests is Network-tools.com
Site Optimization
A large portion of the reason sites become slow is because they need to be optimized. Most websites today are dynamic sites. This means that the content of the website is at least partially generated when a visitor requests the page. Many times, the generated content is dependent on a database. If either the database or the code that interfaces with the database, and generates the page for your visitors is not optimized, it can lead to a slowdown in page load times.
There are several tools that can be used to pinpoint where a site could be better optimized.
· Page Speed Grader - Performs speed analysis and provides a breakdown of how long it takes to load your page as well as a detailed breakdown of potential issues
· WebPageTest - Similar to Page Speed Grader, but provides output analysis in a different format that may be more readable for some.
· Google page speed - both an online service and a browser plugin that will analyze your page similar to the methods used by Page Speed Grader and WebPageTest
In addition to these tools, There are some guides that you can use to optimize your website without necessarily having to perform analysis.
· Our Optimizing Wordpress article will give you good information if you have a WordPress blog that is experiencing slow load times.
If after using these tools and guides, you find that your site is still experiencing load time issues, it may be time to contact a developer to assist in optimizing your scripting. Alternatively, you may wish to upgrade your hosting account to a VPS or dedicated server to handle the extra load.
Configuration Issues
The third possibility for site load times being slow is the least common. It is possible that there is a configuration issue with the domain. The ISP your visitor is using to requesting the site, or with the server. Any issue with one of these three can cause your site to load slowly or in some cases the site will not load at all or only some of the time. These issues can often be confused with connectivity issues.
If you believe you are experiencing a configuration issue with your site, please give us a call at 888-401-4678 or visit us in live chat.
Domain Configuration Issues
Domain configuration issues are primarily issues with your DNS. These can cause site load times to be slow because the server does not have proper routing information to serve your website to the visitor requesting it. You can diagnose and repair this kind of issue by following these steps:
7 Diagnose DNS issues using an online tool. Some reliable tools are listed below:
o LeafDNS - Provides detailed information on potential DNS configuration issues in a user friendly graphical format
o Network-tools.com - Can help you locate DNS issues by showing you your DNS configuration file or DNS zone
o intoDNS - Another tool similar to LeafDNS that provides information on your DNS configuration in a different format
8 Address any configuration issues reported by the above tools in your cPanel using the DNS zone editor.
ISP Configuration Issues
It is also possible that a visitor to your site may be experiencing issues with their ISP's configuration. In this rare scenario, you will want to have your visitor run a traceroute as directed above, and then contact the ISP. You will want to provide the traceroute information to the ISP to assist them in resolving the configuration issue.
Server Issues
Server issues are the most rare cause for a site to experience slow load times. All servers at Bluehost are constantly monitored and tuned to ensure that they are performing at optimal speeds. However, in certain rare instances it is possible for the server to become overloaded, and this can cause a slow down in site load times. These issues are often temporary and will resolve themselves in time. If you feel that there may be an ongoing server issue causing your site to load slowly, please perform a traceroute and contact us with this information so that we can locate and resolve the issue.
Common reasons for a site to load slowly
The time for loading a web site depends mostly on:
1. The number / size of external resources included in the site;
2. Properly resized images to their visible size;
3. The database queries executed while the site loads.
Examples:
l You have included RSS feeds on your page(s). In order to display the RSS feeds, your web site needs to retrieve them from remote servers. As each connection to a remote server takes some time, the more RSS feeds a page has, the slower it will load.
l You have a picture with dimensions of 1024x768, which is 1MB, and a small thumbnail that shows a preview of this picture. It is a common mistake to use the same unresized large image as the thumbnail. The proper action would be to resize the large picture to a smaller image that matches exactly the size of the thumbnail in pixels.
l You use database-driven application for your website and have added many modules for additional functionality. Some of them are not even very popular and you are not sure how well optimized they are. Others you do not even use actively any more, but you have not removed them after testing them initially. The additional modules will generate database queries at each visit to your website. If these queries become too many or some of them need too much time to be executed, your website will load slowly.
In order to speed up your site we recommend:
l Decreasing the number of external resources on your site.
l Optimizing the size of the images used on your website.
l Decrease the number of additionally installed modules / components for your application.
l Decrease any additional / extra features in your site like searches, statistics and others.
l Check the internet for specific optimization instructions for the application you are using.
10 things you can do to speed up your site
1. Minimize HTTP Requests
According to Yahoo, 80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different pieces-parts of the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. An HTTP request is made for each one of these elements, so the more on-page components, the longer it takes for the page to render.
That being the case, the quickest way to improve site speed is to simplify your design.
l Streamline the number of elements on your page.
l Use CSS instead of images whenever possible.
l Combine multiple style sheets into one.
l Reduce scripts and put them at the bottom of the page.
Always remember, when it comes to your website, leaner is better.
Pro Tip: Start a campaign to reduce the number of components on each page. By doing this, you reduce the number of HTTP requests needed to make the page render—and you’ll significantly improve site performance.
2. Reduce server response time
Your target is a server response time of less than 200ms (milliseconds). And if you follow the tips in this article, you’re well on your way to achieving this.
Google recommends using a web application monitoring solution and checking for bottlenecks in performance.
Pro Tip: Read this report by Singlehop, Critical Ecommerce Infrastructure Needs, to learn nine things you need to focus on to keep your site performing well.
Then tap into these resources:
l Google’s PageSpeed Tools – to learn more about performance best-practice and automate the process.
3. Enable compression
Large pages (which is what you could have if you’re creating high-quality content) are often 100kb and more. As a result, they’re bulky and slow to download. The best way to speed their load time is to zip them—a technique called compression.
Compression reduces the bandwidth of your pages, thereby reducing HTTP response. You do this with a tool called Gzip.
Most web servers can compress files in Gzip format before sending them for download, either by calling a third-party module or using built-in routines. According to Yahoo, this can reduce download time by about 70%.
And since 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that support Gzip, it’s a great option for speeding up your site.
Pro Tip: Read this article for more details on Gzip compression. Then set up your server to enable compression:
4. Enable browser caching
When you visit a website, the elements on the page you visit are stored on your hard drive in a cache, or temporary storage, so the next time you visit the site, your browser can load the page without having to send another HTTP request to the server.
The first time someone comes to your website, they have to download the HTML document, stylesheets, javascript files and images before being able to use your page. That may be as many as 30 components and 2.4 seconds.
Once the page has been loaded and the different components stored in the user’s cache, only a few components needs to be downloaded for subsequent visits.
In Theurer’s test, that was just three components and .9 seconds, which shaved nearly 2 seconds off the load time.
Theurer says that 40-60% of daily visitors to your site come in with an empty cache, so it’s critical that you make your page fast for these first-time visitors. But you also need to enable caching to shave time off subsequent visits.
Static resources should have a cache lifetime of at least a week. For third-party resources like ads or widgets, they should have a cache lifetime of at least one day.
For all cacheable resources (JS and CSS files, image files, media files, PDFs, etc.), set Expires to a minimum of one week, and preferably up to one year in the future. Don’t set it to more than one year in the future because that violates the RFC guidelines.
5. Minify Resources
WYSIWYG resources make it easy to build a Web page, but they sometimes create messy code—and that can slow your website considerably.
Since every unnecessary piece of code adds to the size of your page, it’s important that you eliminate extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation in your code so your pages are as lean as possible.
It also helps to minify your code. Here’s Google’s recommendation:
l To minify HTML, you can use PageSpeed Insights Chrome Extension to generate an optimized version of your HTML code. Run the analysis against your HTML page and browse to the ‘Minify HTML’ rule. Click on ‘See optimized content’ to get the optimized HTML code.
l To minify JavaScript, try the Closure Compiler, JSMin or the YUI Compressor. You can create a build process that uses these tools to minify and rename the development files and save them to a production directory.
6. Optimize images
With images, you need to focus on three things: size, format and the src attribute.
Image size
Oversized images take longer to load, so it’s important that you keep your images as small as possible. Use image editing tools to:
l Crop your images to the correct size. For instance, if your page is 570px wide, resize the image to that width. Don’t just upload a 2000px-wide image and set the width parameter (width=”570”). This slows your page load time and creates a bad user experience.
l Reduce color depth to the lowest acceptable level.
l Remove image comments.
Image format
l JPEG is your best option.
l PNG is also good, though older browsers may not fully support it.
l GIFs should only be used for small or simple graphics (less than 10×10 pixels, or a color palette of 3 or fewer colors) and for animated images.
l Do not use BMPs or TIFFs.
Src attribute
Once you’ve got the size and format right, make sure the code is right too. In particular, avoid empty image src codes.
In HTML, the code for an image includes this:
<img src=””>
When there’s no source in the quotation marks, the browser makes a request to the directory of the page or to the actual page itself. This can add unnecessary traffic to your servers and even corrupt user data.
Pro Tip: Take time to re-size your images before uploading them. And always include the src attribute with a valid URL.
7. Optimize CSS Delivery
CSS holds the style requirements for your page. Generally, your website accesses this information in one of two ways: in an external file, which loads before your page renders, and inline, which is inserted in the HTML document itself.
The external CSS is loaded in the head of your HTML with code that looks something like this:
<!—Your styles –>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”all” href=http://yourURL/style.css />
Inline CSS is nested in your page’s HTML and looks like this:
In general, an external style sheet is preferable, because it reduces the size of your code and creates fewer code duplications.
Pro Tip: When setting up your styles, only use one external CSS stylesheet since additional stylesheets increase HTTP requests. Here are a two resources that can help:
Avoid including CSS in HTML code, such as divs or your headings (like the inline CSS pictured above). You get cleaner coding if you put all CSS in your external stylesheet.
8. Prioritize above-the-fold content
Having just recommended that you use only one CSS stylesheet and no inline CSS, there is one caveat you need to consider. You can improve user experience by having your above-the-fold (top of the page) load faster—even if the rest of the page takes a few seconds to load.
Pro Tip: Consider splitting your CSS into two parts: a short inline part that styles above-the-fold elements, and an external part that can be deferred.
9. Reduce the number of plugins you use on your site
Too many plugins slow your site, create security issues, and often cause crashes and other technical difficulties.
Pro Tip: Deactivate and delete any unnecessary plugins. Then weed out any plugins that slow your site speed.
Try selectively disabling plugins, then measuring server performance. This way you can identify any plugins that harm your site speed.
10. Reduce redirects
Redirects create additional HTTP requests and increase load time. So you want to keep them to a minimum.
If you’ve created a responsive website, more than likely, you have redirects in place to take mobile users from your main website to the responsive version.
Pro Tip: Google recommends these two actions to make sure a responsive redirect doesn’t slow your site:
l Use a HTTP redirect to send users with mobile user agents directly to the mobile equivalent URL without any intermediate redirects, and
l Include the <link rel=”alternate”> markup in your desktop pages to identify the mobile equivalent URL so Googlebot can discover your mobile pages.
I have a fashion website and it was too slow to upload. One of my friends suggested me to contact SHILabs Private Limited to decrease page loading time. They did a good job for my website and also helped me to rank in search engines.thanks for sharing keep it up for the good work
ReplyDelete