Reasons Why Your Site Might Be Slow
There are a large variety of factors as to why your website might be slow, but there below list provides the most common reasons for website performance optimization problems.
An Under-Resourced CMS
Your website’s content management system plays a very important role in establishing its load speed. Fortunately, or unfortunately, not all content management systems are built the same. They are highly application-specific.
For instance, WordPress has been designed for blogging websites. Magento, on the other hand, is exclusively designed for ecommerce websites.
Using a CMS that lacks in robustness to facilitate the resources of an ecommerce website, translates to an increased load time.
A Poor Performing Server
Your customers enter your website’s URL into the address bar. The browser then sends a ping to the server, asking to return the information and data about your ecommerce website. The server forwards your customer’s request to your server. Your server complies and finally the customer is digitally transported to your ecommerce website.
Imagine, what happens if your server does not promptly facilitate the submitted request? Naturally, it would take longer time to respond and your customer will have to wait longer.A
Un-cached Static Content
What is static content? The content on your ecommerce website that does not change. This blog you are reading is a static content. It’s not meant to be changed. However, our main blog page is not static – new blog posts will be added to it from time to time.
Now, every time your customer wants to view a certain page or content on your website, a series of requests are made. If some of your content is saved in a directory—we call it caching the content—the request will be processed faster.
Since your static content is not meant to change, you can cache it, allowing the server to retrieve the information quickly. Where it won’t be cached, it will take longer for the website to load.
Plugins and Third-Party Widgets
Webmasters love using plugins and third-party widgets, for the integration adds to a site’s functionality. Greater the functionality, the more impressive is the website. But, at what cost?Increased loading time.Sure, every ecommerce website needs plugins and widgets but not every widget or plugin.
These are the most fundamental changes you can make to help speed of your website.
Additional Tips for Improving Your Website Performance
Streamlined website performance is essential. If your pages fail to load on time as your website visitors become more demanding and impatient by the day, then you could be missing out on business. What’s more, after they leave your website, they will tell others about how awfully long it took to even load the page and they won’t be coming back with bad word of mouth turning away other potential customers as well.
On the other hand, website performance is not just important for the visitors but for search engines as well. Google, for instance, specifies that it takes site load times into account when ranking them, so a slower website equals to a lower rank.
Here are a few tips to optimize your website for better performance:
Optimize Your HTML
Avoid copy pasting from other word processing applications. Copy pasting from word processors can add in a lot of complexity to HTML that contributes to slower load speeds. Also, use simple structures in your HTML that comply with all standards. This way, browsers will be able to parse your page easily.
Finally, remember that while it is good to leave a lot of white space to focus attention on the things that matter, they add to the overall size of your web page (in bytes).
Optimize Your Images
Simply put, larger images result in longer page load times as your browser pulls down more data. Therefore, remember to pick the right size for the job. High Definition images for your product displays are one thing, but a ‘follow us on Facebook’ image is another. Similarly, choose the right image formats and resize them directly instead of using HTML scaling.
Use Text Instead of Images
Balance good design with streamlined performance. Although a no brainer, but some people forget that text renders much faster than images and is also more effective for SEO.
Cache Your Output
This may be a bit more complicated, but you can optimize the performance of your website by caching at both the client’s end and the server’s side. Server-side caching will put a cap on the number of queries you make to the database, while browsing caching will reduce HTTP requests.
Choose Your Hosting Service Provider Wisely
Whether you are hosting your website on your premises or using a hosting service provider for managed dedicated servers, you will get precisely what you pay for. If you are running a production quality website, avoid shared hosting and go for managed dedicated hosting instead.
How to Use SSD Hosting to Speed Up Your Website
SSD hosting is a type of hosting service that utilizes SSD fitted servers as opposed to the servers that come fitted with traditional hard-drives.
You may ask, “What hard-drives have to do with web hosting?”.
To put it in simply, just like a hard-drive helps you store and retrieve information while using your computer or laptop; it also helps to store your website’s content and distribute it to your website visitors when they access your website.
Difference Between SSDs and Traditional Hard-Drives
Traditional hard-drives also known as HDD, are electro-mechanical devices. They have an arm that writes and reads data to and from a spinning disk. The rotation speed of the spinning disk determines how fast data can be read or written. Servers that come fitted with HDD form the sustaining core of HDD web hosting services.
SSDs on the other hand are purely electronic devices. They don’t have any mechanical parts and data is sent and retrieved electronically. SSD hosting servers use SSD storage devices for operation.
Since SSDs are completely electronic devices, the speed at which they read and write data is faster than what a traditional hard-drive is capable of. Faster speed means, servers that come fitted with SSDs are faster than HDD servers and thus give better performance.And, when you have a high performing server, naturally your website loading and navigation speed is fast.So, as far as the reliability of the claim is concerned that SSD hosting makes your website superfast.